World Drawn to Sha Tin
“For all that has been written about this seething territory, what particularly strikes the visitor is the way extremes can sit side by side in comfort. It is a curious thing. The coming together of China and the former colony’s capitalist culture is but one endorsement of the concept that opposites attract.
“Another is Sha Tin racetrack, where 37 foreign-trained horses will join the locals in disputing more than $7 million (£3.65 million) on Sunday. Sha Tin is a fusion of the man-made and the natural. It is where towering apartment blocks compete with mountainous terrain to enclose the site in a cylinder of rock. And if that image isn’t sufficiently incongruous, you can see Alec Wildenstein, the enfant terrible of French racing, disembark at Sha Tin from a coach overladen with journalists.
“It is within such a framework that Hong Kong’s International raceday has evolved. Once the graveyard for slow horses from Europe, Hong Kong fully merits its baptism as the new-born babe of global racing. There is no doubt that its all-expenses-paid policy has attracted foreign horses beyond their station. Equally, it has contrived a beguiling sequence of four races, none of which will be easily won. And the ten-furlong Cup bequeaths a race to which any nation would aspire.” (Times)
More: “The routine is rarity in Hong Kong” (MSNBC)
