Vincent Ho Is Taking The ‘Ups’ From The ‘Downs’

THE MIDDLE FINGER of Vincent Ho’s left hand doesn’t sit flush with the others. It’s crooked. He lifts the hand from the wooden table top, moves all four fingers, clenches and wraps his thumb then repeats the action a few times.

“It works fine, but it will look like that for the rest of my life,” he says, examining the finger’s abnormal curve closely.   

‘The rest of my life.’ There is something disarming in the casual matter-of-factness of the comment. After all, his slightly wonky finger is the only outward sign that Ho has cheated death in the past year. Twice.

The healed vertebrae can’t be seen, nor the impact that two shocking race falls might have had on his mind.

“Actually, it didn’t shake me up too much in terms of coming back to ride,” he says and his words are a reminder that a jockey’s perspective on life’s dangers is extraordinary compared to most other mortals. Ho simply got on with the business of recovery and return.

It was almost a year to the day, coming off the final turn in a 1200m dirt track race for newcomers at Niigata on July 29, 2023, when his summer plans crashed to a halt: he hit the ground with sickening speed and force and didn’t move.

“The season before was amazing, a record high in terms of winners and Group 1s and all that,” he continues. “The idea was I’d ride a few weeks in Japan and head over to the UK for Goodwood and Shergar Cup and then back to Japan for the World All Star Jockeys’ series, but with the injury I’m lucky to still be alive.”

His T5 vertebra was fractured, he had whiplash, and a pneumothorax on his lung; when he regained consciousness, he screamed in agony.

Seven weeks later he was back race-riding. Six months later he was down again. It was another horrible, crunching, tumbling fall that left him laid out and unmoving on the home turn of the Sha Tin dirt track. That time he had four fractures to the vertebrae in his neck, plus that broken finger.

“That one probably shook me more because that was the second close one that could have actually killed me,” he says. “I’m just lucky enough to not be killed and to come back.”

He speaks as his food arrives. A bowl of homely country soup for this vegan athlete at the cheerily catered Posthorn tea room in Leyburn, North Yorkshire, a couple of miles from his temporary base in Middleham. He would have been here last year but for his unwanted detour via a Japanese hospital bed. 

Ho is most famous as being the ever-present rider aboard the exceptional Hong Kong champion Golden Sixty. He is one of Hong Kong’s top three or four jockeys. He has reached those heights through a constant quest for self-betterment of mind, body, and skillset, which is shown in part by his choice every year to travel overseas during the eight-week Hong Kong off-season and experience riding outside Hong Kong’s intensive two-track circuit. He enjoys it and finds it both refreshing and educational.

He went to France for the first few summers; then he decided to try England and got an ‘in’ with Mark Johnston, and nowadays the son and licence holder Charlie Johnston in Middleham; in 2022 he went to Japan and had five wins, and last year the fall that scuppered his summer plans.

“Every experience, even riding out in the morning in Mr Johnston’s place, it all helps me improve as a horseman. You know, riding uphill gallops, the uphill gallop in Conghua is nothing until you meet this uphill gallop, even in Newmarket the uphill gallops can’t compare to this,” he says.

Middleham is on a rural Wensleydale hillside, famous first for the medieval castle, now an imposing ruin, that was the home for a time of King Richard III. In latter times it has long been established as a significant training centre, making the most of the testing inclines of the nearby windswept moor. Middleham horses are tough.

“You get to ride all the two-year-old colts and fillies here, and the same in France: you don’t get those in Hong Kong so you don’t get to ride them, it’s all geldings. The temperament, the mentality of the colts and fillies, it’s different, and getting to know them helps you develop as a horseman,” Ho says.

“And then you have the different racetracks, uphill, downhill, left, right, straight, they’ve got long straight, short straight, tight turns; sometimes the back straight, like at Leicester, you’ve got it going right and left. Everything is different, it’s not a standard circle; not like when you come into the straight at home you have to push already, here you might have four or five furlongs to go and you have to wait.”

Goodwood is still ahead of him when he speaks to Idol Horse, as is a visit to France to catch up with old friends like Gerald Mosse and see some Olympic Equestrian events. He’s had one winner from seven rides that have taken him to Pontefract, Doncaster, Musselburgh and Leicester.

“If I drive three and a half hours for one ride that runs last it doesn’t matter, because it was probably my first time riding at that track and I gained something from doing that,” he says.

“And then drive another three and a half hours back again,” he adds with a laugh.

Ho will always look for the positive in a situation. He considers the last year with measured reflections: he pauses as he thinks how best to sum it up.

He goes with “Up and down,” but adds in his typically upbeat way that everyone’s life is like this, it’s just that he had it packed into one season. As well as the falls he had an 8-meeting suspension for a dead-heat win on Capital Delight – the stewards deemed he had eased off in the final stride or two – that ruled him out for a month, but he came back in December to win the International Jockeys Championship at Happy Valley and be aboard Golden Sixty for the gelding’s third win in the G1 Hong Kong Mile.

“It helps you mature,” he says. “I’m the kind of person who takes things in a positive way and I try to think about how I can stay humble, so I find ways to keep going and improve myself or understand the injuries and my body and my mind.

“This has surely helped for the future, especially when you have that understanding of the risks of being a jockey and that you can’t do this your whole life. It makes you think to maybe plan for the future.”

At 34 he is very successful at what he does, he is in his prime years and has no ‘deadline’ set for his career, no age or date by which he will finish. He emphasises that he loves what he does. If he did not, he would not be sitting in Leyburn after riding three lots that morning when he could instead spend his summers switching off completely, away from the sport.

“I love riding horses, but when I have time, I should enjoy doing other things I love as well. I think that’s important, my personal life, I should also enjoy that more,” he says.

“The injuries just gave me the opportunity to find time to look for other stuff, or look for something to prepare for the future. It could be entrepreneurial, it could be in racing, it could be both. We’ll just see what opportunities bring, but you don’t really want to sacrifice years of the profession you’ve learnt either and it’s also good to give back, but you also have to think about what makes you happy. And, of course, what makes a person happy doesn’t have to be selfish.”

Being a top jockey in Hong Kong brings the kind of wealth he could only dream of as a child. Even with a drastically truncated 2023-24 season resulting in a 41-win tally well short of his recent totals, his mounts still earned prize money of more than HK$87 million (approximately US$11 million). Ho appreciates his position and is actively trying to give something back to his community.

“I have a yacht, with a partner, and along with the yacht club we have organised some charity events for kids and for blind people to come out and experience sailing,” he says. “These sorts of things, when you see the joy, that makes you happy, so it doesn’t have to be everything about myself.

“We’ve had some people come along who used to sail and then they lost their sight and now they are able to come and sail with us and the joy they had and how grateful they were, thanking me for giving them the opportunity, it was humbling because I was like, ‘no this is one of the happiest days of my life’. It’s about what you can bring to people.

“And I can also do that within horse racing. There’s still a lot to learn, whether helping horses or helping people.”

He is grateful to the people who supported him last season. His old boss Caspar Fownes and Golden Sixty’s trainer Francis Lui get particular mentions, as does Pierre Ng, but also owners like Stanley Chan, and Capital Delight’s owner Peter Law who supported him with more rides following the dead-heat suspension.

Support is vital to the success of any jockey and Ho knows he will need more next season if he is to break into the top three again. He is aiming to get back to 80 or 90 wins and agrees that 100 would be even nicer, but points out that champion Zac Purton and the popular Hugh Bowman have strong support.  

“It still won’t be easy and that’s why I have to be riding better,” he says. “It’s always a positive competition, as long as you ride as good or better than them the opportunity will come, and that’s one of the reasons why I always work through the summer, to get experience in the summer and become a better jockey.”  

After the Hong Kong Jockey Club flew him home from Japan last summer, Ho’s mindset of wanting to understand and do things better took him to Geneva to get the best rehabilitation treatment he could find. When the stewards gave him that unwanted month off, he went back to Switzerland for more treatment, to understand how his body works, how it heals, and what he can learn from that, and he returned there after the second fall that put him out for three months.

“Going there speeded up my rehab process,” he says. “There was no rush to come back and I was more prepared after the experience last time. I had more check-ups until the fractures were more stable and then I went back to Geneva where the sports science and the treatment is the best. Because of that, my neck is stronger than before.”

Not only his neck. Ho’s ‘up and down’ year has strengthened him all-round, that crooked finger included.