Reigning Hong Kong Horse of the Year, Beauty Generation (NZ) (Road To Rock) made it eight wins in succession when he led all the way to take out the Gr.2 Chairman’s Trophy (1600m) at Sha Tin.
The New Zealand-bred gelding is unbeaten in seven runs this season and has now notched 17 wins from 30 starts in his career to date.
Hong Kong’s champion might have followed the blueprint that has served him so well in reaching high rank in the global standings – galloping to the fore and then rolling onward to victory – but there was no hint of “Beauty fatigue”, not a whiff of boredom at another bloodless triumph; not from the crowd and certainly not from the horse.
“Bored, this horse? Not at all,” trainer John Moore declared as the ring-side spectators cheered yet another picture beneath the winner’s arch with owner Patrick Kwok.
“Romain (Clavreul – work rider) gives me his feedback, and, what I can see, the horse loves where he is and he doesn’t like getting beat. Even when he’s on the small track every morning, he wants to pass horses. He’s just amazing.”
That competitive instinct is so often manifest stable-side with a mean-spirited bite or lunge at his groom, Lau Wai-kit. Purton believes the horse just wants competition, to show he’s the boss.
“He loves racing. He wants to get out there and do it more often!” the rider said.
Beauty Generation is a superstar at the peak of his abilities and the consensus after this latest triumph was that he should be as potent as ever in the Gr.1 Champions Mile (1600m) at the end of the month – after that, he could test his mettle internationally in Japan’s G1 Yasuda Kinen (1600m) in June.
“Zac (Purton) came in and said he’d improve for this,” Moore said. “We didn't squeeze him too much for the run so there’ll be further improvement for the Champions Mile. That’s three weeks away and we’ll keep him ticking over.
“I might trial him; I might ask for a 1000-metre trial or something to top him off.”
Purton revealed that a strong breeze blowing down the back-straight made things that little bit tougher for his mount.
“He was good enough to get the job done,” the Australian said. “He had to carry extra weight and the one thing I was more concerned about was the wind.
“The headwind down the back-straight is really strong. Having to carry the extra weight – giving weight away to the other horses – it wasn’t going to be easy. To offset that I stayed well away from the rail and made Joao (Moreira) on Conte run into it as well. I thought, if I’ve got to run into it, he can join me and I’d take what I could out of him as well.
“He came into this race a little bit soft today,” he continued. “He had a soft trial and he hasn't been screwed down in his work so he was always going to improve on what he gave us today, so there’s more merit in the win than it may have looked. He went out there and did what we needed him to do.”
Bred at Greg Tomlinson’s Nearco Stud, Beauty Generation is a graduate of the 2014 New Zealand Bloodstock Yearling Sale series.
