DJANGO UNCHAINED: THE LIVING IN HOPE ISSUE

There were plenty of fireworks on the track during the Longines HKIR day at Shatin last Sunday. It’s tiring just thinking about it.

There were the wins of Voyage Bubble, Romantic Warrior, the facile win that was almost an exhibition gallop by Ka Ying Rising- what did they beat?- a protester who nearly stopped the running of the Hong Kong Cup before being tackled to the ground, and the kinda odd Jesus Moment by the Club’s CEO who, as usual, described this year’s event, too, as being the “greatest” and added how it offered, er, “hope”.

This “greatest” of greatest days was despite attendance and turnover figures being down, which was dismissed as being inconsequential compared to this new “hope” that had entered the big picture of life.

Winning Wini then probably walked on water, turned water into wine and fed the forty thousand.

On top of all this, quite a few days during and after HKIR week were spent by those who live on the social media platform known as X talking about who had given a certain visiting racing personality from Down Under quite a bashing. It turned out to be the bouncers from well known Wanchai nitery Joe Bananas. The overseas visitor had no hope.

As for HKIR Sunday, was it really appropriate for the HKJC to have the Korean artist named Rain and his gyrating dancers perform at 11:30am at Shatin racecourse a few days after the devastating fires in the city?

Couldn’t this performance have been replaced by some type of salute and Thanks from the Hong Kong Jockey Club for the brave firefighters of the city been fit in somewhere?

Meanwhile, this race day would probably be eligible for the Guinness Book of World Records for the Longest Race Meeting Toute Le Monde.

This was when everything finally ground to a halt at around 6.30pm and the singing and dancing Now United group were left to throw plushies into the smattering of people waiting for their freebies.

Apparently, the jockeys who are usually given the job of lobbing these plushies to racing fans had left the track. It had been a very very very long day’s journey into night.

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While there’s much talk about the pros and cons of Artificial Intelligence, and the cons leading the pros, came news of someone quite high up in the education sector in Hong Kong having to step down after approving an AI generated paper handed in by a student.

How AI could falsify pretty much everything, something which is being seen in politics, the odds of the right “prompting” of something like the running of a horse race is very probably just around the corner.

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PARTING SHOT