The message landed minutes after the announcement, and it wasn't from a trainer, an owner or anybody with money riding on it. It was from a fan.
"The time has come," he wrote, with a teary emoji. Then, after a pause: "I have no regrets for Romantic Warrior."
Nobody does. How could they, after a horse that contested Group 1s in five countries, won in four and earned more prize money than any horse in history? But Romantic Warrior didn't just win races. He built a fan base and connected continents when the sport needed it most.
Consider where he started. His Hong Kong Derby, in March 2022, was run in front of nobody – no fans, no owners, no winning photograph. Peter Lau watched the biggest day of his racing life to that point on television at home, in his pajamas. Sha Tin in those months was a strange, echoing place, the sport running on muscle memory while the city stayed indoors.
Then the gates opened, and the horse who won the emptiest Derby in history became the reason people came back.
First, it was the rivalry with Golden Sixty, which gave Hong Kong a genuine argument. Then came the passport stamps: Moonee Valley, where twenty seconds of photo-finish agony turned into a Cox Plate. Tokyo in the rain for the Yasuda Kinen, thousands of Hong Kong voices in the stands and tens of thousands of Japanese ones joining in. Meydan and a course record. Riyadh, and that dirt duel with Forever Young, the one that got away and somehow made him bigger in defeat.
The plans from Lau were ambitious and the execution from trainer Danny Shum Chap-shing was flawless. What the frequent flier status earned was fans around the world. This week in Japan, a Hong Kong gelding was the top trending story on X, ahead of Shohei Ohtani.
And he saved plenty for last. Fetlock surgery at the age of seven would have finished most careers. He came back to win six from six, five of them at Group 1 level, and became just the third horse to sweep the Hong Kong Triple Crown.
But Sha Tin is where the legacy will live longest. Walk down to the winning post on a day Romantic Warrior was racing and you'd find a clutch of supporters who looked like they had wandered in from a football terrace. Hand-painted signs. Flags in the breeze. Plush replicas of the horse held above heads. Chanting, actual chanting, in a sport that caters more readily to those who want to stand quietly with a form guide or drink champagne in a box. They were younger than the crowd around them, and more of them were women.
That is the part racing should be noting. The sport didn't get those people through marketing campaigns or fancy rebrands. It got them through a horse. The obvious worry is that they leave with him.
Thankfully, Ka Ying Rising races on Sunday, a sprinter with the speed and swagger to hold a new audience through the next era. He inherits a grandstand that has been taught how to make noise.
Romantic Warrior arrived when Hong Kong racing needed color and left the place louder, younger and more crowded than he found it – a legacy that will long outlive any amount of prize money. The evidence that it lasts is already in. "I'm a fan of Hong Kong racing forever," the same racing fan wrote. No regrets there either.
