What's Different About the 2026/27 Hong Kong Racing Season?
Updated: Aug 27
A New Frontier - The 2026/27 Hong Kong racing calendar
Trackwork opened at Sha Tin on 31 July, and with it the countdown to a season that looks different from any that's come before it. The 2025/26 campaign closed with the usual theatre — Caspar Fownes claiming a fifth trainers' title, Zac Purton crowned champion jockey for a ninth time after becoming the first rider to reach 2,000 Hong Kong winners — but the season ahead isn't really about defending those crowns. It's about three genuine firsts: a global superstar trainer walking into Sha Tin for the first time, a new financial architecture designed to pull higher-class horses into the city, and — for the first time in the Jockey Club's 141-year history — a real race meeting on Chinese soil.
James Cummings arrives
The single biggest name change on the trainers' list is James Cummings. The 37-year-old spent eight years as Godolphin's head trainer in Australia, sending out 52 elite-level winners including Anamoe, and is the youngest trainer in Australian racing history to reach 50 Group 1 wins. He stepped away from Godolphin at the end of July 2025 specifically to prepare for this: a full year with no stable of his own, spent building relationships with Hong Kong owners before his licence takes effect this season. He's called the move "a sliding doors moment," and the Jockey Club has been characteristically blunt about what it thinks it's landed — CEO Winfried Engelbrecht-Bresges framed the recruitment as part of a "multi-year strategy for adding new talent to the ranks of world-class trainers."
Cummings joins a training colony that's been refreshed hard over the last three seasons. Mark Newnham, Pierre Ng, Cody Mo and David Eustace have all arrived and immediately competed near the top of the table — Eustace in particular sent out 30 winners in his first full season and capped it with a treble at the season finale at Happy Valley. Brett Crawford, who took over the Olympic Stables complex vacated by Jamie Richards, will be looking to follow that same trajectory. It's now one of the deepest training ranks the sport has ever assembled in one jurisdiction — Size, Fownes, Hayes, Cruz, Lui, Lor, Yiu, Yip, Shum, Ng, Mo, So, and now Cummings, all training out of the same 2,000-metre circuit.
Money follows quality
The Jockey Club isn't just recruiting trainers — it's re-engineering the incentives around horse quality itself. New for 2026/27 is the Premier Series: a set of Class 1 to Class 3 races staged either side of the Hong Kong Derby, designed specifically to showcase Derby-calibre horses and reward the import of higher-rated stock (70+). Winning or placing in a designated Premier Series race triggers a new Top-Up Bonus, with roughly HK$20 million on the table across the series. Stack that against the existing Privately Purchased Horse bonus scheme and an eligible PP can now earn up to HK$4 million across all its milestones. The Classic Mile and Classic Cup purses are each rising by HK$1 million too, to HK$14 million apiece.
None of this is subtle. The Club has been explicit that it wants to keep pulling higher-rated horses out of Australia, Europe and Japan and into Hong Kong ownership, and the bonus architecture is the lever.
The first race meeting in mainland China
The genuinely historic item on the calendar is Conghua. The training centre 150km north of the border — built on the old 2010 Asian Games equestrian site — has quietly become central to Hong Kong racing already: more than a third of last season's runners, including Ka Ying Rising and Voyage Bubble, used its facilities. What changes this season is that it stops being purely a training base and becomes a racecourse in its own right.
The first meeting is locked in for Saturday 31 October 2026, likely five or six races, and — in keeping with how carefully the Club is managing the moment — it'll be an officials-and-invited-guests affair rather than a public one. The real launch, according to Engelbrecht-Bresges, comes with the second meeting at the end of November, which is expected to be open racing "for everyone." Reports suggest four meetings are planned at Conghua across the season. There's no betting on the mainland, so this is racing purely as spectacle and showcase for now — a genuinely different proposition to anything run at Sha Tin or Happy Valley, and something trainers like David Hayes have openly said they're curious to see in action. The facility itself is enormous: over twice the footprint of Sha Tin, four tracks, stabling for more than a thousand horses, and a new grandstand built for around 8,000–9,500 spectators.
It's worth sitting with what this actually represents. Hong Kong racing has operated on essentially the same two-track footprint since 1978. Conghua is the first meaningful expansion of where the sport is run in almost half a century, and it's happening across a border, inside mainland China's evolving national equine industry strategy — a genuinely new chapter rather than an incremental one.
On the saddle
The jockey ranks carry over most of last season's international contingent — Purton, Bowman, Teetan, Hewitson, Bentley, Atzeni, Badel and Ferraris among the full-season Club Jockeys — with the usual traffic of part-season UK riders (Richard Kingscote, David Probert, James Orman) filling in over the European off-season. The story worth watching is at apprentice level: Britney Wong became the first female apprentice to ride full-time in Hong Kong in seven years when she debuted at Happy Valley last November, and heads into this season with the runway to build on her first 29 winners.
The shape of the season. The Hong Kong racing calendar.
Put together, this isn't a season defined by one big storyline — it's three at once.
A marquee trainer arrival that instantly raises the competitive ceiling. A bonus structure that's explicitly trying to lift the quality of horse coming into the city. And a geographic first that starts to answer the question Hong Kong racing has quietly been asking for years: what happens when you're no longer constrained to two racecourses on one small piece of land. Trackwork's already underway. The real answers start in September.
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