Zac Purton is mid-sentence when he becomes distracted. He’s trying to access the jockeys’ gym at Sha Tin but can’t find the door code he needs if he’s to enter; he excuses himself from the conversation, solves the problem, and resumes a few minutes later.
It’s Tuesday afternoon in Hong Kong, five days before the first Sunday in September when the 2026-27 season will get going: his 20th campaign in the city he has lived in since he was 24 years old; riding the circuit that has forged him and developed him into a record-breaking champion.
Purton is actually a nine-time champion jockey, but that statement, impressive as it is, makes far too little of what he has achieved. The Australian has dominated the Hong Kong jockey premiership ever since he saw off the phenomenal Joao Moreira in the latest and last mind-sapping, body-wrecking duel between the two for the title. That was July 2022 and proved to be the Brazilian ace’s final full season in the city.
At 43, Purton has been through downs as well as many ups. He made plans to leave, after saying in October 2022 that he’d retire in two years, but he didn’t. And he is not winding down: not when his body is “the best I’ve felt for about six years”; not when there’s another title to shoot for; not when there’s the megastar Ka Ying Rising to ride and a tilt at winning a second G1 The Everest locked in his sights.
“The way that he tore through the back end of last season, I’d like to think that he’s got another 12 months at that level and if that’s the case, it really puts him in the stratosphere of some of the all-time great horses that we’ve seen. If he’s not already there,” Purton says of the brilliant gelding he has ridden to 20 straight wins.
“In fact, I don’t think he needs to do anything else to prove he’s there, I think his legacy is already set,” he adds.
Riding the world’s best sprinter, one of the best racehorses there has ever been, is “a privilege” he would not swap, and having ridden him in a couple of barrier trials in recent weeks, he believes Ka Ying Rising might be physically stronger than ever before as he heads into Sunday’s pipe-opener, the G3 HKSAR Chief Executive’s Cup.
“You’d think that he’s just turned six so he should be a fully mature horse, but the fact that he grew in the offseason could suggest that he still was developing, he got up to eleven-hundred and ninety-something pounds in the summer,” Purton tells Idol Horse.
“Even watching his trial back from last week, he just looked like a bigger horse amongst the other horses in that trial, whereas early on in his career, he looked like he was out of place against the better horses, but now he’s looking like he’s the one that stands out.”
Ka Ying Rising’s heaviest racing weight last season was 1164lb, and just as recent barrier trials have been essential to the great gelding’s smooth return to race fitness after a summer break, so they’ve been important for Purton, too.
“The start of a season is always the hardest,” he says. “That’s when I’ve really got to push. I’ve got a limited amount of time to get as fit as I can as quickly as I can, so it’s just pushing as hard as I can every day leading into the start of the season.”
Purton and his wife Nicole have spent their summer break holidaying overseas, as they have done pretty much every year since they became parents to their children, Roxy and Cash. This year it was Singapore and Indonesia, including Bali. Beach time and fine dining.
It’s a balancing act. Wind down and enjoy, but only enough that you can get the body hardened and sharpened in the couple of weeks you give yourself after.
“I need to get my weight back down as well, so that’s a large part of it,” he adds.
He makes a rough estimate that with barrier trials, trackwork, gym work “and whatever else you do,” he might put in about five hours of fitness work each day. The weather, he laments, has not helped much this pre-season: the rain has been almost incessant since they returned, foiling plans and dampening much desire for outdoor training.
“At the same time,” he says, “we’re fortunate that we have a lot of barrier trials leading into the season. There’s nothing that can replicate riding a horse in a race or a trial to get fitness back to where it needs to be. But you really have to push hard leading into the start of the season.
“Once I get a few weeks in, the natural fitness comes back and you can take the foot off the pedal a little bit.”
It might be argued that Purton’s foot has not needed to be flat to the floor since Moreira’s departure. But he would refute that notion, respecting the abilities of the riders he faces week in, week out. Besides, last season the roster was stacked at times, with short licences handed to Sydney’s own superstar James McDonald, and from Europe, Hollie Doyle, Maxime Guyon and Dylan Browne McMonagle, then late in the season, on a three-month spell that snared 32 wins, Moreira himself.
Purton was still the runaway champion. There’s no question those fly-in cameos enlivened Hong Kong racing, kept it fresh for the fans, and added something to that competitive edge the circuit was always famous for, but the champ sees it from a different perspective.
“I think when the roster was as full as it was at stages last season, it’s not healthy for the environment here,” he says. “It’s not good when you’ve got 10 or 12 jockeys sitting there in the jockeys’ room that can’t get a ride. It starves everyone of an opportunity and it makes it pretty hard to build any kind of momentum at all.
“And then that leads to a bit of an unhealthy situation within the room, and that can flow on to the track as well. It’s a bit of a hard pill to swallow when you’re doing a lot of work and not getting much of a go.”
He speaks about how race flow changes and rhythm is unsettled when new jockeys arrive on the scene, and makes an analogy that anyone familiar with riding Hong Kong Island’s streets in the back of a red, white-topped, Toyota Crown Comfort knows well.
“It’s like being in a Hong Kong taxi where the taxi driver’s got one foot on the brake and one foot on the accelerator, and he’s surging back and forward the whole way,” he says. “The races can just get a bit of that feel in them and then you get the jockeys taking off at the wrong times and creating waves of momentum when they shouldn’t be there, and then at other times, they’re waiting too long when they should be getting into the race.
“It can be a bit of a challenging period at times, but I suppose that’s just part of sport, right? There’s always a lot of moving parts and you have to adapt.”
Purton, though, is also speaking from experience, recalling his early years in Hong Kong when he was fighting for connections, riding trackwork on horses only to lose the rides to established names. Then again, he has benefited from his own name, too.
No one connects quite like Purton. He is a wily master of the Hong Kong system, understanding the importance of making contacts in order to succeed. A big part of the Hong Kong way is socialising, having dinners with owners and forging bonds. Even as the top rider in town, old connections must be maintained and new ones sealed.
“It’s still important, I still socialise a lot with owners,” he says. “Ultimately, my success comes down to the support I receive and I’ve just got to hope the owners and trainers out there keep giving me the opportunities, and if that’s the case then we’ve proven before that we can do well.
“But it’s a matter of trying to keep everyone happy and keep the relationships intact and work our way through it. But the owner base is changing all the time as well, you’ve got new owners coming on board, new syndicates being formed, so it’s always evolving and changing and now we’ve got a lot of horses owned by mainland-based owners as well.”
New Chinese owners from the mainland have brought a boost to the ownership ranks, which suffered a dip for a period post-Covid. But it does bring challenges.
“It’s harder to get to meet them, you usually only get to see them on race day, really,” Purton says. “The Club have people here who handle the mainland owners, so they’re always in the parade ring, and if you happen to go to dinner with those owners, the Club people will always be there and that’s mostly because they can’t speak English so they help facilitate the conversation. They’re very helpful because they know those mainland owners very well.”
With the new season so close, he says he doesn’t have any particular horse he is excited about besides Ka Ying Rising: “I’m just trying to filter my way into the season and see where I end up, see where it takes me,” he says.
But then, the great horse will always be the focus, and especially the closer they get to The Everest, the world’s richest turf race. He swats away any notion of pressure, though.
“I look at it like there’s an expectation now, he’s expected to perform at a certain level every time he goes out there,” he says. “The bar’s been set very high now, but as long as he keeps getting the job done, that’s the main thing.
“I’m pretty lucky, I’m over here in Hong Kong out of the spotlight in Australia and fly in for the race so I get to avoid being put under the blowtorch. I’ll let David be front and centre like he was last year and handle that in that way that he does.”
And Purton will handle the season, Ka Ying Rising and all, the way that he has done for a very long time.
“The aim is just to keep doing what I’ve been doing,” he says. “I’m not trying to reinvent the wheel. There’s a flow to the season and you just want to get into it and get going, get to the internationals, blow through to the Derby, the Champions meeting and then wrap it up. It’s the same every season. Once you’ve been here for as long as I have, it becomes second nature really.”
He makes it sound easy, but the hard battle to regain fitness and make weight, then maintain that 40-something frame of his through the “grind” of the “very monotonous Wednesday, Sunday, Wednesday, Sunday,” of a Hong Kong season, through summer’s humid, sapping heat and even the brief winter’s cold, is “mentally and physically challenging.”
But this is what Zac Purton knows, it’s what he does best, and he does it better than anyone else these days.
“I enjoy riding, I enjoy the adrenaline of being out there in a race and competing. I enjoy winning,” he says.
“I just enjoy what I do.” ∎
