Eight-time champion Moore to return to Macau training ranks
Handler ends second stint in Australia with hope Asian jurisdiction can ‘get things going again’
Gary Moore has closed the door on his second Australian stint, one which netted him a Group 1 win courtesy of sprinter Takedown (Stratum), and he will soon return to Macau where he was an eight-time champion trainer to continue his career.
The trainer closed his Rosehill stable in mid-June, which had been his base since 2014, with a view to returning to Taipa, a centre where he rode until his retirement in 1997 and then trained from 2000.
The Macau Jockey Club has granted former champion jockey Moore, 70, 12 permits for the 2022-23 racing season with the trainer now on the hunt for horses and owners ahead of his impending return to Asia.
Moore has no regrets about his time in Australia – he trained for two years at Randwick in the late 1990s and 2000 – second time around.
“I came back to Australia, I’ve trained a Group 1–winner and I’ve trained next to the best trainer in the world in my eyes, Chris Waller,” Moore told ANZ Bloodstock News last night.
“As you get older, you learn a lot more about training a racehorse, but I am definitely going back to Macau with a lot more connections. I’ve been very lucky in Australia that I’ve trained for the Arrowfield Group, I have trained for Bon Ho, I’ve trained for Yulong, so making this move is going to be quite amazing for me.
“I’m not going to just walk in and away we go. It’s going to be a challenge because we’re looking at a racing jurisdiction that needs… to get things going again. Hopefully, Hong Kong and Macau can open up.
“With this happening, hopefully things can improve to where they were when I left there eight years ago.”
The effervescent Moore never contemplated retirement, identifying Macau as the destination to reinvigorate his training career and declaring himself “full on” in his dedication to the sport.
“I’ve got a young family to support, so I can’t retire yet. Look, I am really pumped to be able to make this decision. My wife’s Chinese and she is going to be a little bit closer to family, but that wasn’t in the decision to go back to Asia,” he said.
Moore’s son Nicholas is already a trainer in Macau while his brother-in-law Peter Leyshan also holds a licence in the Asian jurisdiction.
Since receiving word that he would be accepted back into the Macau training ranks, Moore has been trying to implement ways to grow exposure to racing on the island, reaching out to Tabcorp, the owner of Australian racing broadcaster Sky Racing, in a bid to have meetings from Taipa shown on television.
“I spoke to someone at Tabcorp and asked, ‘why aren’t you televising Macau racing into Australia?’ to try and promote the Macau Jockey Club,” he said.
“You’ve got Singapore, you’ve got Malaysia, but they don’t have Macau… but I haven’t heard back yet.
“I think there might be a conflict of interest maybe with the Macau government. I don’t know… but it is something that needs to be looked at. People in Australia, if they could watch Macau racing, then they could start racing horses up there.”
Moore was also dismayed that speculation Hong Kong horses would be allowed to race in Macau rather than heading straight into retirement had, as yet, not come to fruition.
“Two months ago, I heard retired horses were going to go directly from Hong Kong to Macau and I thought, ‘at last, they’ve seen the light to allow owners with horses that mightn’t be quite good enough to win in Hong Kong to come across to Macau and be able to generate some kind of income for the owners who have spent a lot of money to race them in Hong Kong’,” he said.
“That is one thing that I was really sad about, that [HKJC chief executive Winfried Englebrecht-Bresges] decided against it – he put a line through it – and I don’t think that was in the best interests of racing.”
During his first training tenure in Macau, Moore formed a strong bond with the late Stanley Ho, preparing Viva Pronto (Catcher In The Rye), a Magic Millions two-year-old purchase, to win 14 races including the 2010 Hong Kong Macau Trophy (Listed, 1400m) for the casino magnate.
Moore famously charged down the Sha Tin straight in jubilation after Viva Pronto’s success in Hong Kong, something he repeated at Ascot in Western Australia upon Takedown’s 2016 Winterbottom Stakes (Gr 1, 1200m) win.
“Viva Pronto had zero pedigree and the boss (Ho) said, ‘he looks like a donkey’, but I won four straight with him. He won the Macau Hong Kong Trophy and he also won the Hong Kong Macau trophy,” Moore recalled yesterday.
The son of champion Australian jockey George Moore, Gary briefly trained in partnership at Rosehill last year with his brother John, himself a champion Hong Kong trainer until his forced retirement, but the stint was short-lived. John Moore moved to the Gold Coast to train in his own right before later abandoning his Queensland stable to return to Hong Kong to live.