Caspar Fownes wants competition in the jockey ranks. Five meetings from a fifth trainers' title, he has thrown his weight behind a full-time return for Joao Moreira – the only rider, he reckons, who can give Zac Purton a fight. "Nobody else can. End of story."
True. But perhaps a 42-year-old Moreira isn't the answer the Club should be chasing in the long term. What Hong Kong really needs is a young Zac Purton.
Imagine thirty-year-old Purton versus 43-year-old Purton. The mouthy upstart who told owners their horse was a donkey, against the magnanimous king who now praises his old and new rivals like a man with nothing left to prove. As someone who's known and reported on both versions of Purton, I can tell you it would be box office. It would also sell newspapers – not least because we'd spend every Monday ringing current Purton to tell him what young Purton just said about him on Australian radio, then writing up the stinging retort by deadline.
Remember young Zac? He always had his eyes on Douglas Whyte’s throne and wasn’t shy about voicing it. One story conveys it well: on a Friday before the International Races, he bolted into a lift in the apartment building at Sha Tin ahead of Whyte and pressed every button on the panel so the old king rode up floor by floor, stewing as he stopped. Asked about it by the chief stipe kim Kelly, Purton shrugged. Didn't remember a thing. Maybe it was the kids. That was the competitive engine – the appetite to needle, to taunt and to want the throne so badly he'd play silly games to rattle its occupant. Purton missed a 2012-13 title to kidney stones and came back the next season to smash the fastest-50 record almost out of spite.
The trouble is, it would take more than lift pranks and trash talk to unsettle 43-year-old Purton. Whatever you throw bounces straight off. Moreira says it best: he believes Purton's gift is finding exactly the right thing to say to knock you off your game, then standing beside you the next morning like nothing happened.
Nor has Purton’s dominance waned – if anything he's more settled in it. He sits on 134 winners this season, miles clear of Andrea Atzeni on 60, yet well short of the 179 he posted in his pomp. That's not decline, it's pacing. A man ready to retire three years ago has reinvented his body, diet and perfected recovery, and now looks capable of cruising at this altitude for as long as he fancies. He isn't even over-reliant on one feed of winners, either, the way Whyte leaned on John Size until the rug was pulled and the fall came fast. Purton spreads his bets.
"People have become happy to just ride 30 winners," Fownes said – and there's the rub. Young Purton was never happy. Not at 30 wins, not at 64, not even when he rode more than 100 and still finished second to Moreira. That hunger built nine titles; you can't import it. Maybe everybodty is a little too comfortable now. The perks have never been better. And iironically it was Purton and Moreira's own lobbying, back when they were busy destroying each other, that dragged jockey conditions to a standard now second to none. The two ultimate fighters built the cosy house the field is happy to lounge in.
So bring Moreira back, by all means. He’d certainly help shake things up in the short-term. But the heart of the rivalry we actually need can't be imported.
