Like it does through most things in racing in the region, the Moore name runs deep through the history of the Hong Kong-Macau interport series.
Between them, brothers John and Gary have won nine of the series’ 32 contests – the former 6-3 to the good – among countless other conquests in their glittering careers.
While the name Nicholas Moore does not appear on the honour roll, and realistically probably still won’t after Saturday’s Class One Hong Kong Macau Trophy (1,400m), the son of Gary is no stranger to an interport series that has been running since 2004.
“I was assistant to Dad and came to Hong Kong with Viva Pronto when we won [in 2010]. I’ve been to Hong Kong probably five times with six or seven horses,” said Moore, who saddles up Out To Win in this weekend’s contest.
Trainer Nicholas Moore leads Out To Win at Sha Tin on Thursday morning.
“It’s my first runner in Hong Kong. Being in Hong Kong is on another level. To have a runner in Hong Kong, it doesn’t matter where he runs. I’m just happy to be here.”
Out To Win will be an outsider in a field featuring rising Hong Kong star Beauty Eternal, but Moore is happy with how his charge is tracking after winning four times in Macau this season.
“Out To Win travelled really well. It’s a long barge trip, and by the time they get to the other end on the float, it’s about 11 to 12 hours, so they sweat quite a bit. But he hasn’t left a grain. He goes very well fresh, and he’s racing very well in Macau,” Moore said.
“The Hong Kong horses are a lot better than our horses, so I’m going in realistic. But he’ll run a good race. He looks well. He’s in the top three 1,400-1,500m horses in Macau.
Out To Win gallops at Sha Tin on Thursday morning.
“That’s where we’re at, but you don’t really know where you’re at until you take them out of where you’re racing and see how good they are.”
While it seems obvious Moore would end up a trainer given his breeding, there was a time not that long ago when the 40-year-old was not sure if the racing game was for him.
After working as his dad’s assistant in Macau and Australia, Moore was ready to take the next step in 2014, but fate had other ideas.
“I was at the stage of my life where I wanted to join Dad’s stable as a trainer, but he wasn’t open to that idea back then,” Moore said.
Gary Moore takes off down the Sha Tin track after Viva Pronto’s win in the 2010 Hong Kong Macau Trophy.
“For a while, I felt like I might go with somebody else who might give me a chance or gain more experience on a local scale, but unfortunately my time in racing just came to an end. So I opened a cleaning business and ran that for four years. I left racing altogether. But throughout those four years, something was missing in my life.”
After spending time with his uncle John at Sha Tin in 2018, Moore became a trainer in his own right in Macau in 2019, and now things have come full circle, with father and son joining forces last year.
“In Macau, things got a bit harder trying to source owners because we were in lockdown for three years, so I rang Dad and said, ‘I think we should think about joining up. You can work on the PR side, and I can do the training’,” Moore said.
“He was pretty keen on the idea, so he made the move from Sydney, and we’ve been training in partnership for probably six months. Things have been going really well. We’ve started the season well together.”
