Comanche Brave won the July Cup at Newmarket on Saturday and racing's old guard will file the result away as the natural order confirmed: Europe's great six-furlong championship decided, a stallion made, another line added to a roll of honor that stretches back to 1876.
Read it the other way around.
Ten weeks ago, the same horse turned up at Sha Tin for the Chairman's Sprint Prize and was sent out at 366-1 against Ka Ying Rising – probably under the odds. He finished fifth, beaten more than six lengths, and at no point in the 1,200 meters did he threaten to lay a hoof on the champion.
That, now, is the winning form line of the July Cup: nowhere near him.
After his Sha Tin thrashing, Comanche Brave went home and won the Group 2 Greenlands Stakes before Newmarket, so this is no fluke horse – he is a genuinely smart sprinter. Which is precisely the point. The gulf between genuinely smart and all-time great was measured at Sha Tin in April, and it came back at six lengths and change.
Also left in Ka Ying Rising's wake that day, for the fourth time, was Satono Reve – and on Saturday Japan's best sprinter was quietly doing the benchmarking again, adding another Group 1 placing just a length and a quarter behind Comanche Brave. Manhandled by the champion at every meeting, yet beaten only narrowly by the best everywhere else – including at Royal Ascot, where the progressive Almeraq got past him – he is the most reliable measuring stick in world racing.
And Almeraq's Ascot win came with Joliestar narrowly beaten in third – the same Joliestar comfortably swept aside in The Everest, still Ka Ying Rising's only start outside Hong Kong. That form keeps compounding too. Tempted, second at Randwick, hasn't lost since: three from three through the Australian autumn, including a Group 1 at a mile, before dropping back to 1200m to beat the best of the three-year-old colts. Jimmysstar was third, then won his next two, one of them a Group 1 in Melbourne. Overpass, fourth, was touched off at the top-level next time and ran a bold race for third at Royal Ascot.
Wherever the horses Ka Ying Rising has beaten go next, they win or go mighty close. Fast Network, fourth in that Chairman's Sprint Prize, is the next witness called: he heads to Japan for the Centaur Stakes and the Sprinters Stakes rather than face another beating at home.
This is what the Hong Kong Jockey Club's Winfried Engelbrecht-Bresges means when he says the conversation has changed. "People are now benchmarking what happens in Europe against the form in Hong Kong – and that was never before," the CEO told the Standard on Sunday. "Previously, you had to go to Europe to prove yourself, now you come here."
For a century and a half, the traffic ran one way. Europe made the champions, minted the stallions, and everyone else had to travel there to be judged. As my Idol Horse colleague David Morgan argued last week, the July Cup remains a "stallion-making race" – and good luck to it. But making stallions and measuring champions are different businesses, and the measuring is increasingly done in Hong Kong, where the world's best sprinter smashes whatever is put in front of him.
The old guard can rage about that or accept it. Racing no longer revolves around them. The axis of world racing is slowly shifting.
