Michael Chang will always deflect praise, so let's use this space to hand him the credit he is too modest to claim after he reached 400 winners in Hong Kong with a double at Happy Valley on Wednesday night.
Even in the moment, Chang turned the spotlight outward, paying tribute to his fellow trainers and to a city where, as he put it, "every raceday is Melbourne Cup Day." He joined the Jockey Club in 1987, long enough to know that nothing here comes easily, not even a Class 5.
His bond with the Club and the sport goes back to childhood, when he lived above the stables on Shan Kwong Road where his father Joe worked as a mafoo. The boy who watched the horses walk down the hill to trackwork at Happy Valley each morning became a jockey, then assistant to four different trainers, including David Hayes, before taking out his license in 2005-06.
It was Rich Tapestry who took him, and Hong Kong racing, somewhere it had never been. Bought from Dermot Weld as a Derby prospect, the gelding couldn't stay, so Chang and Olivier Doleuze turned him into a dirt sprinter, and in October 2014 he won the G1 Santa Anita Sprint Championship by a nose to become the first Hong Kong-trained winner in the United States.
Before he left, the Jockey Club made its position clear: Rich Tapestry, a horse with four recorded bleeding episodes, would race without Lasix. Chang could have used it, as most visiting Europeans at the Breeders' Cup did, but he never argued the point.
"The rules are the rules," he said. "The HKJC and the CEO want clean racing, no drugs.”
Three weeks after Santa Anita, a cold snap on Breeders' Cup morning had Chang fearing the worst, and the short-priced favorite trailed in last before scoping with blood in his trachea. Nobody can know what Lasix might have changed, and Chang has never offered it as an excuse. He prefers to talk about the fun he had, including meals at the Hong Kong-style diners in Arcadia near the racecourse and a month he and his team, including trackwork rider Vincent Sit Shun-keung, now a successful assistant trainer to Francis Lui Kin-wai – will never forget.
Courteous and media friendly doesn't begin to describe Chang, who can often be found with a cigar at the press table at the races, a place where he has always been welcome.
He is not alone in understanding that his job carries a responsibility beyond the winner's enclosure. On Tuesday, Zac Purton and David Hayes, the man Chang once served as an assistant, stayed for more than two hours after Ka Ying Rising's barrier trial, giving interviews to anyone who asked and signing autographs for every fan who waited.
Vincent Ho's selection as one of Hong Kong's Ten Outstanding Young Persons this week, meanwhile, is recognition that reaches far beyond racing's audience, and a reminder of the unique profile a jockey can have in this city.
Hong Kong has not always been so well served by those granted a license here, some of whom treated the privilege as an entitlement. Chang, Hayes, Purton and Ho are changing perceptions at home and abroad by carrying it with class.
Chang is too humble to say it, so we will: he has been a fine ambassador for the Jockey Club and a damn fine trainer, and 400 winners is just reward. As he said on Wednesday, "After 20 years, I'm still standing here."
