Hong Kong Jockey Club to go ahead with National Day race, but prepared to cancel again if protest risk threatens safety

The head of the Hong Kong Jockey Club is set to go ahead with Saturday’s races at Sha Tin and hopes to hold the National Day meeting on October 1 as well, although he is not ruling out a repeat of Wednesday’s last-minute cancellation to avoid any potentially chaotic disruption by anti-government protesters in future.

Jockey Club chief executive Winfried Engelbrecht-Bresges told the Post on Thursday that the scrapping of the Happy Valley race meeting was a one-off because of safety concerns sparked by the threat of protests against outspoken pro-establishment lawmaker Junius Ho Kwan-yiu and his horse, Hong Kong Bet, which was due to run on Wednesday.

Ho, who has become a hate figure for the protest movement, announced a day after the cancellation that he and the co-owners of the horse had decided to suspend it from races altogether until the end of the ongoing social unrest for the sake of the city’s “long-term stability and tranquillity”.

Engelbrecht-Bresges said the reasons for the drastic action taken by the club “were not specific to racing, they were very specific to a situation”.

“At this stage, we have no indication there is any concern about not going ahead with Saturday’s race meeting,” he said. “But if we encounter another significant risk when it comes to running a race meeting, we will act in a similar way. Safety has to come first.

“We hope it is not the case, there were very specific reasons we came to this decision on Wednesday and hopefully we won’t be put in the same situation again. You don’t do it lightly.”