The Penny Drops: Nichola Yuen’s Nine-Year Road To Happy Valley
Covid stalled her progress and it took stints from South Australia to Cape Town to get her there, but the 26-year-old apprentice has finally ridden at Hong Kong’s historic home. South African great Andrew Fortune explains the moment it all clicked.
The Penny Drops: Nichola Yuen’s Nine-Year Road To Happy Valley
Covid stalled her progress and it took stints from South Australia to Cape Town to get her there, but the 26-year-old apprentice has finally ridden at Hong Kong’s historic home. South African great Andrew Fortune explains the moment it all clicked.
18 September, 2026Walking into the Happy Valley mounting yard for the first time, silks fastened, whip in hand, is a big moment for any Hong Kong apprentice jockey, it’s a rite of passage few people get to experience, it’s a moment of trust.
That’s because when an apprentice is licensed in Hong Kong, after a period of development which includes learning to race-ride overseas, they are at first only allowed to ride at Sha Tin, ‘the big track’ with its longer straights and wider turns. Happy Valley, Hong Kong racing’s historic home, is a different challenge: undulating terrain, tight turns, speeding around in close-packed quarters. A novice jockey must prove their ability to cope with such a test of skill, nerve and tactical nous before they’re allowed to ride at the Valley, however long that takes.
Nichola Yuen had taken longer than many just to get licensed, never mind ride at the iconic downtown circuit. But Covid-19 had plenty to do with that: Yuen had the misfortune of having her development interrupted at a crucial juncture by the worst pandemic to hit the world in a century. Her overseas training was delayed until 2021, eventually taking her to South Australia, New Zealand, and after a spell back in Hong Kong, to South Africa.
So, there she was on September 9, 2026, age 26, nine years after she entered Hong Kong’s apprentice jockey school, walking into that Happy Valley mounting yard to race-ride there for the first time.
Minutes later, she was legged aboard the Dennis Yip-trained Lean Master, then out onto the floodlit track she went, the lively crowd and the rising grandstand at her back, the electric lights of high-rise Causeway Bay and the starting gate for the 1200-metre sprint ahead of her.
“It was not very great, because I started off with some bad barriers,” Yuen tells Idol Horse, reflecting on her first four Valley mounts, all beaten. “But experience-wise, it was nice, the first time being in races there, it’s a good learning experience.”
Truth be told, the experience was everything: no one except perhaps herself was envisaging the 10lb claimer might nail a win, it was all about the learning curve, and one of the keys to that is Felix Coetzee, the retired South African champion who rode the great Silent Witness and whose knowledge and expertise the Hong Kong Jockey Club long since tapped into to coach its successive cohorts of aspiring apprentices.
Yuen had already gone a circuit of the Valley before the Lean Master ride; she’d walked it before racing began, the entire circumference, alongside Coetzee, who has been a close mentor to her – as he and the school’s headmistress Amy Chan are with all apprentices – through every step of her development.
“Felix is just the most amazing riding master because he’s so open-minded that he’s still prepared to learn himself,” says Andrew Fortune, an old weighing room peer of Coetzee who is still riding at the top in South Africa at age 59. “We run ideas through each other, like, we’ll watch some of my rides and I’ll tell him this is why I’ve done that, and that’s what I felt. So, we’ll try and discuss it and he’ll carry it through to the apprentices in Hong Kong.”
Fortune, within touching distance of his own remarkable career’s ending, had the opportunity to help coach Yuen during her final overseas stop-off, working together at the powerful Justin Snaith stable in Cape Town, South Africa. Yuen arrived there in September 2025 for what became something of a finishing school, with Coetzee and Chan alongside.
By then, she had already racked up 61 wins – including a four-timer – riding out of Richard Jolly’s stable in South Australia, and then Gary Searle’s operation, and a further 10 in New Zealand under the tutelage of Leith Innes.
But it was in Cape Town that all of those years of learning and experiencing came together.
“The funny thing is, she battled a little bit when she first came here, even though she had one or two winners to begin with,” Fortune says. “What I found was, a couple of months before she went back to Hong Kong, the penny kind of started dropping.
“The last three months, she made such improvement. For me, it’s a lot of small things, like, where your body is, where your hands are … and once you get that … Me and Felix will watch the top jockeys, like the Australian champion, James McDonald, and we see there’s a lot of common denominators in all the top jocks. Their hands are at the right place.
“I’m talking about the real top jocks, ok – I’m not talking about the makeshift top jocks, like, they call them top jockeys but they’re not really top jockeys – their hands are always in a comfortable place, and the horse always looks comfortable. It’s just that Nichola started getting that concept at the end of her time here – she kept the hands at the right place and made huge, huge improvement the last two to three months before she left here.”
Yuen’s route to the jockeys’ room started when she was 10 years old, went to Lei Yue Mun public riding school in Hong Kong, and became hooked on horses. She had been captivated a couple of years earlier by the equestrian events at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, which were staged in Hong Kong. By the time she was 16, she knew further education was not for her and applied for the apprentice school.
The school has been a fundamental part of Hong Kong racing’s talent development since 1972 when the great Tony Cruz was among the first intake, alongside another jockey turned champion trainer Ricky Yiu. Like all fresh apprentice jockey candidates, Yuen learned the basics at the school facility at Sha Tin where ‘headmistress’ Chan, a former elite badminton player, brings a sports psychology and athletic performance mindset to the training, and where Coetzee brings layers of race-riding intelligence, knowledge and skill.
Yuen was small and lacked strength, but she had something within her that sets apart the hopefuls from those who actually make it through to race-riding at Sha Tin and Happy Valley, where they must compete within an arena of intense scrutiny and pressure against champions of Zac Purton’s and Hugh Bowman’s standing.
“She has always had a big heart,” says trainer Jimmy Ting, recalling the young woman whom he first encountered in her early days at the school. Yuen spent time working in the stables of Ting, Cody Mo, Manfred Man, and Yiu, with Yiu eventually becoming her boss.
“When she was young, in my stable, she was a little bit weak but she was a hard worker,” Ting continues. “She had a strong heart and she knew that she needed to work hard and try hard if she was to become a jockey.
“She knew what she needed to do and she always improved. She’s a nice girl, she’s a good rider and we can see she is still improving.”
Yiu told Idol Horse in March, at the time Yuen was first licensed in Hong Kong, that he had to see off six other trainers who had applied for her to be their stable apprentice, and noted that the “chemistry is good”, and that while his protégé was already a good trackwork rider, he still had “a lot to find out” about how good she would be in races.
Fortune had little doubt Yuen would be up to scratch when she returned home: the attitude and mindset were already there when she arrived in South Africa, and Coetzee and Fortune brought out the finishing touches together.
“We did a couple of riding lessons with her,” Fortune says. “You could just see it. Like, I said to her, ‘Okay, just drop your hands here, just relax, just breathe, breathe; just chill.’ And I just … Felix came down and he was like, jeepers, how’s the improvement come?
“I kind of think that penny started dropping with her as we were schooling, because – not just me – I’ve done a couple of sessions, but Felix wanted me to concentrate on her. I used to put them on horses and watch them and get on a horse myself; I’d show them, okay, this is how it’s done. Did you watch that? Okay, now you do it. Felix asked me to use her as the example if a horse had to go do something, and then with Nichola the penny dropped nicely, and I can see now.”
Yuen stepped out for her first race day at Sha Tin on April 1. Her first win came two rides in, riding the Yip stable’s Pi Legend, and by season’s end she had 14 wins on the board at a near 13 per cent strike rate. Already this term she has notched two wins from 17 rides.
“Riding horses is quite simple,” Fortune says. “You get up and just let them do their thing, you just put them in a position without dictating that much, and then, after that, it’s just complete rhythm and momentum because they know how to run. All you’ve got to do is stay balanced.”
Yuen’s eyes lit up at the mention of Fortune when approached at Happy Valley one week after her debut there.
“Very real – a real character,” she said of him. “Funny, but serious at the same time. And of course he is a very good horseman.”
Fortune’s personality and his tutelage clearly made an impression on Yuen, just as Fortune was taken with Yuen’s bright personality and her ability to watch and learn.
“The feeling of how to travel with a horse in the race,” she said when asked what she had learned from him. “He has great hands and he taught me how to get a horse to travel. He taught me how to ride a horse with feelings – not pull – to listen to the horse, to connect with the horse.”
Lean Master was only eighth for Yuen on her Valley debut. But the jockey had fired her mount from the widest draw in 12, secured the lead without drama, maintained a clean posture – relaxed and balanced, hands low – and executed a tidy drive as the pack closed and passed her. Four rides that night, best placing fourth, Yuen wanted more, but the evening wasn’t about the results as much as it was the next phase in her development.
She is four wins away from the drop to a seven-pound claim, but that isn’t fazing her, in fact, “exciting” is how she describes it.
“Of course, there’s much improvement,” Yuen says she needs to make, and offers “finding a good, clear run and positioning horses,” as areas to get better at.
“Hopefully I can improve more in the future,” she adds.
Despite it taking nine years from Yuen’s first day at the jockey school to stepping out at Happy Valley, Fortune makes an observation which is important to consider in relation to the fact that most youngsters joining the apprentice school in urban Hong Kong have no opportunity to touch, let alone ride a horse prior to their acceptance into the programme.
“To be able to ride horses takes time,” he says. “I mean, it’s not that much of an age thing, it’s more about a time thing, understanding horses and the time that takes.
“What did she do, a nine-year apprenticeship to get here? So, it just shows you, I always say this: there’s no rules to this, you never know if the person’s going to get it or not, so be kind, you don’t know what the person’s going through.”
Fortune’s philosophy to schooling jockeys is what he refers to as “Very much 80-20” in that he will “always tell people, don’t look at my 20 per cent. Eighty per cent is good, 20 per cent is my defects. If I look at your 20 per cent, I can find something wrong in you.”
There was something in that positive approach, and the way Fortune and Coetzee combined to teach, that Yuen connected with. Once that “penny dropped” she was ready.
“I always tell Felix, I feel proud that I had one per cent of one per cent something to do with it and it’s great to watch,” Fortune adds.
“Nichola makes it look uncomplicated, and that’s what it’s all about.” ∎
