Griffin wins can be easy to overplay, but Jedi Spurs made his debut hard to undersell.
Now the David Hayes-trained two-year-old returns to Sha Tin on Saturday chasing back-to-back wins, and the step up to 1,200m is not the only reason to think there may be more to come.
Whether the opposition amounts to much in time is the usual caveat, but the two usual measuring sticks – margin and clock – were harder to argue with.
Data supplied from Hong Kong racing database analyst Sohil Patel shows Jedi Spurs’ four-and-a-half-length victory was the second-biggest margin by a Griffin debut winner in the past 10 seasons, behind only Styling City’s six-and-a-half-length romp in 2017-18.
His 55.81 seconds over 1,000m was also the second-fastest time among Griffin debut winners in that period, with only future Horse of the Year California Spangle going quicker at 55.33 seconds.
The combination is the point. In the past decade, no other Griffin debut winner has paired a margin of four lengths or more with a sub-56-second clock over 1,000m. California Spangle was faster but won by a length; Styling City won by further but was two seconds slower.
Hayes said he had expected Jedi Spurs to make a statement after he had showed promise at the trials, but the preparation was light and rushed – just the two barrier trials leading in – which opens the door for improvement to come.
Among the 22 Griffin debut winners in the past decade, 10 came in the first Griffin race of the season, and therefore guaranteed to produce a debut winner.
Jedi Spurs was not one of them. He beat four griffins with race experience.
The next test is whether Jedi Spurs can do what plenty of good Griffin debut winners have done before him and win again. Of the 19 in the past decade to race again, nine won at their second start.
The list has a bit of everything. The All Out and Thunder Blink both won again in Griffin company, but neither had produced anything like Jedi Spurs’ margin-and-clock profile on debut and neither went on with it. Ka Ying Victory stepped out of Griffin company the following season and won back-to-back races in Class 3.
Circuit Nine was an interesting case: back-to-back Griffin wins, both in slow time, but assigned a rating of 64 in Class 3 and never winning again, despite sliding all the way into Class 5.
But then there is California Spangle, who went on to become a multiple Group 1 winner, and Aethero, who carried the same colours as Jedi Spurs, won five of his nine starts and jumped a $1.50 favourite in the 2019 Group 1 Hong Kong Sprint before his career was later cut short by a bleed.
Styling City made his way to a mark of 99 and won in Class 2. Thanks Forever retired on a rating of 123 as a Group 3 Sha Tin Vase winner, and Hot King Prawn went all the way to Group 1 victory in a Centenary Sprint Cup. Before that, the standout Griffin Amber Sky won his debut by a massive seven and three-quarter lengths in 56.56s and went on to win back-to-back Group 1s later in his career, including the 2014 Al Quoz Sprint in Dubai.
Debut performance of back-to-back Griffin Winners since 2016/17
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