Serious business as Hong Kong champion Fownes looks ahead
Caspar Fownes will arrive at Happy Valley for the final meeting of the Hong Kong season today as the city’s freshly-crowned champion trainer, knowing that his triumph owes as much to his wife Alix’s ambition for him as it does to his own merits as a horseman.
“My wife is the reason I’m successful,” Fownes told Asia Bloodstock News. “I’d be happy sitting in fourth or fifth position but she told me to knuckle down and let’s get it done. She said ‘look, you’ve got to run this more as a business, you’re better than you’re showing,’ and she pushed me to be successful, to source better horses. I did; we pushed it from the start of the season and here we are.
“It’s a case of being a harder person than I have in the past, when I’d keep horses because of friendships with people rather than run it as a business. It has to be run as a business.”
The handler’s harder approach this campaign saw him fend off 11-time champion John Size to claim his first title in seven years, and fourth overall, and has imbued him with optimism that he has the tools and the connections in place to again be among the front runners for the championship when the 2021-22 season kicks off in September.
“It was a wonderful season and I always said ‘let’s bring it, let’s go,’ but I was eating my words for a while there when John went seven in front. Even then, I knew I was working hard and I just needed to trust myself and place the horses right. In the end, I won it quite solidly,” he continued.
“I’d be looking at a top four finish for next season, that’s achievable, and beyond that we’ll have to see.”
So far this century, the only trainer to have gone back-to-back is Size – eight adrift of Fownes in second place this time and with only three runners entered at the finale – as he rattled off three on the bounce between 2002 and 2004 and an incredible four in a row from 2016 to 2019. Brian Kan, Tony Cruz twice, John Moore twice, Fownes three times, and Ricky Yiu – from last year to this – have all been unable to defend a title.
Yiu won his championship a year ago with 67 wins, ahead of Cruz with 65 and Lui with 63. Fownes was fifth with 49 and Size one place behind with 46. This time around, Yiu is down in 12th place with 33 wins, Cruz is sixth with 50, Lui has maintained his form in fourth with 61, while Fownes and Size have leapt ahead with 79 and 71 wins respectively.
“When I won the championship last year, all the horses did really well and were in good form,” Yiu reflected. “But that meant we raced them frequently and then this season they were a year older, they’d gone up the ratings, some picked up little issues. You need to bring in fresh stock but then those good young horses need time, they’re not yet competitive for Hong Kong.”
With no breeding industry and a massive focus on betting turnover, handicaps are the bedrock of Hong Kong’s racing system. To win a title, a handler needs a good base of stock resting on handy marks when the season commences, and a significant enough number that are able to progress through the season, winning as they rise.
That poses a problem for the back-up season, as many of the horses that helped claim the trainers’ title are marooned at their peak marks. Fownes now faces those issues and has the close-season to begin making the right adjustments.
“I want to win the big races next season and I think I’ve got some horses that can really be up there,” Fownes said. “Southern Legend is number two in Hong Kong and he’s nine in a couple of weeks, but we’ve also got Sky Darci and Sky Field, and Killer Bee, that have still got upside to them and could get to 120 ratings.
“I’ve got some good young horses coming in from New Zealand: the New Zealand Derby winner, Rocket Spade, Senor Toba who looks to be a serious horse for the four-year-old series, and Bon Ho’s Storm Legend coming over from Europe who looks pretty smart. We just have to move some of the older stock out and get some new stock booked in.”
Fownes’ regeneration of his stable through the close season will be key to how next term pans out. He already has half a dozen unnamed three-year-old PPGs and ISGs to work with, too, and like all trainers with ambitions on the title, his network of overseas contacts is working to pinpoint and purchase further PPs with proven quality and hoped-for up-side.
He uses Will Douglass and Charlie Gordon-Watson in the UK and on the Australasian front he relies on his own Saturday race-watching, as well as a network of agents and form experts that includes his brother-in-law Clint Hutchison in Australia and Jason Tan in New Zealand.
“We’re getting more PPG permits nowadays, which is what you need in Hong Kong because that’s where horses are coming in at a rating where they can be competitive and you can go from a rating of 52 to 75 or 80, if you’ve got a half-decent horse winning three races.”
Fownes sees an issue with PPs arriving in Hong Kong off three-year-old campaigns against their own age group, only to be pitched into all-age handicaps against seasoned horses.
“The PPs coming in are too highly-rated overall and eight or nine out of ten find it difficult to compete until they get down to a rating that allows them to toughen up and get their form: the speed of the races here is totally different to what they’ve got in the UK, for example, and they’re coming in with that inflated rating, after winning a couple moderate races, coming in off 75 or 76, so you lose that edge when you should be off 52 if you were unraced.”
Fownes was born in Calcutta, India in August 1967 and moved to Hong Kong at age 13. He attended King George V school in the Ho Man Tin area of Kowloon, joined his late father Lawrie Fownes as assistant at age 18 and was granted a licence in his own name during the 2003-04 season – when Peter Chapple-Hyam pulled the plug – having been overlooked at the end of the previous campaign.
His major wins include Group 1 scores at home and abroad with Lucky Nine (Dubawi), Southern Legend (Not A Single Doubt), Green Birdie (Catbird) and The Duke (Danehill). And, for all that he is running a tighter business nowadays, it is still underpinned by the relationships that are the mainstay of any successful Hong Kong stable.
Neil Callan, who will return to Britain on Thursday at the conclusion of a seven-year full-time stint, noted that while Fownes has many connections, given his formative years in the city, so too does Size, who had to build his contacts from scratch.
“Maybe Caspar has an edge over the expat trainers in some aspects, in that he speaks Cantonese quite well and has that connection with the local owners, but at the end of the day it’s about training winners,” Callan noted. “If you’re doing that and you’re seen as a strong stable, you attract the confidence of the bigger owners. Once you get them, though, you have to look after them. The better you do that and the better results you get, the better the reputation you get and the stronger your position becomes.”
Callan was about to attend a dinner with an owner when he spoke to Asia Bloodstock News, while Fownes had just completed 18 holes. Golf, lunch, dinner: all are vital and expected ways in which jockeys and trainers in the ever-fickle Hong Kong racing circle must play the game and connect with owners to build allegiances. Yiu said that he will go for three lunches each week and the same number of dinners, with some weeks busier than others.
“I’m close with at least 80 per cent of my client base,” Fownes said. “I’ll ring them for a chat. About 50 per cent, I’ll go out with for a coffee or lunch or dinner, so we’ve got a good friendship as well as a good working relationship.”
He and Alix have three sons and the older two, Ryan and Ronan, have become familiar around the yard in recent years.
“The boys come into the stables and they’re learning a lot. They’re also my driving force and I want to show them what it’s like to be successful and show them how good the game can be: the highs and the lows. You take the lows with the highs and you keep punching,” he said.
Among last year’s highs was the arrival from Australia of Everest (1200m) winner Classique Legend (Not A Single Doubt), but that turned to a low when the gelding failed to acclimatise, bled, and returned from whence he came. But with a Derby winner and a new batch of exciting prospects to work with, the champion trainer is already focused on the business of next season.
“There’s always something to wake up for in the morning, that’s horses, they’ll always give you something,” he added.