“The Worst Visibility”: The Day Mr Medici ‘Swam’ To Champions & Chater Cup Glory
Voyage Bubble may create history in the final Group 1 of the Hong Kong season on Sunday, but it will be tough for him to match Mr Medici’s incredible success in driving rain.
There are stories galore going back through the long history of the Champions & Chater Cup, ever since it was first run in 1870 at Happy Valley.
It has been contested across a variety of tracks and distances and boasts an honour roll containing some of the greats of the Hong Kong turf: Super Win, Silver Lining, Co-Tack, Quicken Away, River Verdon, Indigenous, Vengeance Of Rain, Viva Pataca, Werther, Pakistan Star and Exultant have won in the last 50 years alone.
For drama, though, few Champions & Chater Cups can match Mr Medici’s win in 2010. It may not have been the highest-quality contest, but it is a race that remains remarkable no matter how many times the replay is viewed for it was run in the most treacherous rain.
That day, much of Hong Kong only received between two and 20 millimetres of rain after a fairly dry week, but Sha Tin was hit by a localised rainstorm that saw more than 130 millimetres fall at the track. It began just before racing started and continued throughout the day, so much so that the final two races on the card were eventually abandoned.
The effect was that a thick curtain of rain covered Sha Tin Racecourse and made much of the track invisible. For all that Sha Tin’s drainage is world class, it could not handle the amount of rain that fell during the meeting and horses were running through large puddles in extraordinary scenes.
An enduring memory is the use of different replay angles in order to keep the field in shot. If they had stuck to the same angles they use for every race, both then and now, much of the race would never have been seen.
English racecaller Darren Flindell, who somehow managed to make out the field as they covered just over a circuit of the track, has been behind the microphone for some incredible moments but has never had one quite like that.
“That’s the worst visibility I’ve ever experienced behind the binoculars,” Flindell told Idol Horse. “To this day, I’ve never called a race in conditions like it.”
Viva Pataca was sent out 2.1 favourite entering off his second G1 QEII Cup win. It was his fifth time contesting the feature, having won in 2006, 2007 and 2009 and finishing second to Packing Winner in 2008.
Packing Winner would reoppose in 2010, while the seven runners also included that year’s Hong Kong Derby quinella Super Satin and Super Pistachio, Derby trial winner King Dancer, and Queen Mother Memorial Cup victor Fat Choy Ichiban.
Most of them were untested on wet tracks and were hoping for more traditional conditions at Sha Tin – for instance, only twice in the last 10 years has a meeting in Hong Kong been conducted on a soft track – but Mr Medici’s jockey Gerald Mosse and trainer Peter Ho were desperate for rain.
“Actually, this was a bit more than we wanted or expected,” Mosse said post-race. “But he coped with it so well. He just picked up in the straight and kept going and I never felt they were going to get him once he got to the front.”
The final time of 2:38.49 was more than 11 seconds slower than Viva Pataca’s time a year earlier and almost 14 seconds slower than the race record, also held by Viva Pataca.
Mr Medici would go on to run with credit in Australia later that year, finishing sixth to Descarado in the Caulfield Cup and 10th to Americain in the Melbourne Cup – both run in similarly wet conditions although not as torrential as his Sha Tin triumph. ∎
