If a week is a long time in sport, two months must be a big chunk of eternity. When Zac Purton nailed his colours to the Sagacious Life mast ahead of January’s Hong Kong Classic Mile, he thought he was partnering an in-form horse with the proven ability to make his mark not only in that Classic Series first leg, but also through the Classic Cup and into the 2000m of the Hong Kong Derby itself. He was wrong and he wasn’t the only one.
He knows that now, but hindsight is no help at the point of decision. Back then Purton had the pick of half a dozen or so likely Derby candidates, including the subsequent Classic Mile winner Little Paradise. Now, with the Derby field about to be announced, his options are bare.
“I don’t have a ride at the moment,” Purton told Idol Horse, ahead of when the final field is announced on Friday. “We’ll see what happens there.”
This is Hong Kong’s eight-time champion jockey, 45 wins clear at the top of the premiership; the man with the most wins in Hong Kong history, with more Group 1 wins in Hong Kong than anyone else; he has two Derby trophies already in the cabinet.
“It is a bit strange to be in this position,” he says. “But, you know, for whatever reasons, the horses that I would like to ride are taken and then I don’t want to be riding one just for the sake of riding it.”
There is a faint ray of hope for Purton in the fact that his two previous Derby wins came on horses he picked up close to the race. Eleven years ago, Luger became his ride when Douglas Whyte stuck with Giant Treasure, and two years ago Massive Sovereign emerged as Purton’s mount after a Hong Kong debut win just three weeks before the Derby. But this is cutting it fine: the Derby is a week and a half away.
“Well, I did make that decision, and I suppose with all the same information I’d make it again, but since then Sagacious Life has just cooked himself,” Purton says.
“Like, on raceday, his last two starts, he’s just absolutely fallen apart. He won’t relax, he jogs, he just … he wants to over-race: yeah, he’s just cooked himself a bit, which has been disappointing.
“Sometimes they go one way and sometimes they go the other and he didn’t go the way I wanted him to go.”
Sagacious Life, trained by Pierre Ng, is a PP, a tried horse imported, in his case, after a top-level campaign in Brazil which included victory in the G1 Derby Paulista over a mile and a half. The gelding won two of his first three Hong Kong starts before fourth in the Classic Mile and last of 14 in the Classic Cup. He was flagged as a ‘roarer’ pre-Classic Mile and that breathing issue surfaced in the Classic Cup.
Sagacious Life isn’t the first horse to have flattered early in his Derby prep only to then fail when the Classic Series was underway and he won’t be the last.
“Temperament-wise, some horses just relax a little bit further into their prep and they start to help themselves a little bit, and then others start to do a few things wrong and they might have peaked a bit too early,” Purton adds.
He notes that it is “a strange year”, with Little Paradise flopping in the Classic Cup, in which the outsider Stormy Grove popped into the race from a leftfield lead-in and won. There is no obvious ace among the crop and the depth seems shallow at this stage.
“Into the Classic Mile, it was exciting, we had a lot of good chances,” Purton says. Then from the Classic Mile on, the whole thing’s fallen apart. There are a couple horses I’d like to be riding, but I couldn’t get on them, so that’s the way it goes.”
The machinations of Hong Kong racing, of which Purton is a master, appear to have worked against him this time. By waiting to see if his preferred options would be available, he missed out on other offered rides, leaving him in a ‘Hobson’s choice’ scenario at best.
“By the time I got an answer and went back, of course, they’d already booked jockeys and it’s just been a bit of a mess,” he says.
But Purton’s Derby travails are just a blip in what otherwise is shaping up to be another exceptional campaign for the Australian.
“If at the start of the season you would have given me what I’ve done now, I would have taken it for sure,” he says. “I started the season really well, rode a heap of winners early, won The Everest, Ka Ying Rising has continued to do what he does, I won two of the four international races as well in December.
“All in all, it’s been a very good season again so far. But it’s just a matter of trying to find some nice young horses now and closing the season off as nicely as I can. It’s disappointing with what’s going on in Dubai because I was really looking forward to riding Fast Network there but it doesn’t look like that will happen.”
There has not been a final decision about the horse’s participation in the G1 Al Quoz Sprint, scheduled for March 28, but after the gelding won a Class 1 on Sunday and with the conflict in the Middle East ongoing, Purton believes it looks unlikely.
“I thought he would have been well suited up the straight at Meydan,” he says. “He’s in really good form. So that’s a bit disappointing, but you know, it is what it is.”
And that’s how he is looking at the Derby, too. Something unexpected might yet occur and a smart ride could fall his way, but right now, the knock-on effect of his decision to ride Sagacious Life back in January seems to have left him out in the Derby cold and it is what it is. ∎
