Hong Kong rugby hall of famer Ricky Cheuk’s sense of timing as finely tuned as ever

“Timing has always been the best element in my life. I have been blessed to have been in the right place at the right time.” So said Buzz Aldrin, the second man to set foot on the moon.

Ricky Cheuk Ming-yin, the first local Chinese player to score a try at the Rugby World Cup Sevens in Argentina in 2001, could say the same thing.

Although the poster boy for local rugby, now aged 34, has achieved much, being an astronaut is not one of them.

However, in a sense his father was an “astronaut”, this being the colloquial term for a man who had a wife, work and children in more than one country, in order to shore up a future for the family, particularly common in the time before Hong Kong’s handover to China in 1997.

Cheuk’s family sent him to Canada when he was eight to live with family friends, and brought him back after the handover.

“I came back to Hong Kong reluctantly,” he says. “I loved the outdoors and wanted to play ice hockey for Canada.”