For the vast majority of the 777 races on the Hong Kong calender, the job of the “leading horse” cameraman is pretty simple. Film the leading horse. Job done.
We've been proponents of finding Joe, the leading horse cameraman, something else to do on raceday for a while now anyway, but on Sunday his job turned into a nightmare as the horses seemingly disappeared behind a wall of water.
An apocalyptic storm descended upon Sha Tin in a matter of minutes, turning a 1,000m straight race into a farce and leaving a camera in desperate need of a horse to film.
Here it comes ... Rain at the 1,000m - not here pic.twitter.com/QjKZ6iASaD
— Michael Cox (@KemblaCoxy) May 24, 2015
Most of the horses and jockeys in the field must have been wondering where their rivals went as the leaders tore away at breakneck speed and left the rest floundering in abysmal conditions.
That was nothing compared to the desperation Joe must have been feeling as his simple task became impossible.
Click here to go to the replay, and then click on “Leading Horse”.
Watch as our beleaguered cameraman looks everywhere in the mist for his leading horse, even at one stage seeming to check in the crowd for the runners.
Like the “Leading Horse” camera, the Trakus “Aerial Virtual Replay” is completely useless most of the time.
But here we are, the one time GPS tracking devices may actually be of some use. Shame it takes a couple of days for the Aerial Virtual Replay to be completed, too late for Joe.
The month of May can produce some crazy results – as shown by a 244-1 shot on Sunday – and obviously some even crazier and more unpredictable weather.
On Wednesday night the Hong Kong Bureau of Meteorology hoisted its first “red rainstorm” warning of the year under the black-red-amber three-tier system, and yet they made it through the eight-race card.
There was another red rainstorm warning on Saturday, while Sunday saw only an amber warning – still plenty, though.
But the 17mm of rain that fell in a matter of 10 minutes at Sha Tin and created a case of "find the leader" wasn't even the worst conditions witnessed by officials in recent history.
This Sunday's Standard Chartered Champions & Chater Cup card marks nearly five years to the day since Mr Medici famously won the staying feature in some of the most ridiculous conditions ever seen on a racecourse.
It is testament to the remarkable draining capacity of Sha Tin's course proper that on both of these May days, the races went ahead even following the deluges – although they only went back out for one race in 2010 before the following two races were abandoned.
On Sunday the track didn't just allow racing for all 11 scheduled events, but the track actually ran fast. There was a distinct leader bias but beggars can't be choosers and in many other jurisdictions there would have been no racing at all.
More than 400mm of rain fell at Sha Tin between 9am on Wednesday to the final race on Sunday, yet the course proper was still producing slick times – all but one of the races ran well below standard time.
Jockey Club racecourse manager John Ridley explained that intermittent heavy rain, followed by quick drying conditions – exactly like what happened over the past week – can have a “packing effect” on the track and leave it firmer than usual.
“And it is almost always favouring front runners when conditions are like this,” he said.
Ridley said the conditions for the 2010 Champions & Chater fixture were worse, but that he had never seen anything like Sunday's storm which “came out of nowhere”.
“We were actually tracking another storm, 20 minutes behind the one that hit, and it ended up missing the racecourse,” he said.
“This one just appeared and caught everybody off guard. The starters didn't even have time to run to their van and get raincoats.”
Of course the corresponding meeting to Sunday's rain-affected fixture would have been ATV Cup day, a raceday cursed with bad weather for years.
There was no ATV Cup this year as ATV has lost its broadcast licence, and the Class One in its place was instead run as the Wyndham Handicap, but it seems the wet weather curse of the second to last Sunday in May has lived on anyway.
