beauty generation
Lau Wai-Kit brings his “best friend” Beauty Generation back to the winners’ enclosure, while Moore gets the low-down from Purton
tries to work on him they have to be very careful. He will bite and kick you, he can be very dangerous. “He still bites Lau, but it’s more playful with him,” adds the trainer. Moore takes the view that champions have their quirks. The handler’s previous star Designs On Rome had a bully boy vicious streak, while the hulking chestnut Able Friend would every morning stand obstinately like a statue at the entrance to the training track. “Beauty Generation wasn’t a problem at first, but now I think he knows he’s good. He gets the VIP treatment – it’s gone to his head a bit! He’s the boss now,” the handler opines. Not just the boss of his own stable, either. Beauty Generation is forging a reputation that puts him at least alongside the absolute titans of Hong Kong racing: Silent Witness and Sacred Kingdom, Viva Pataca and Vengeance Of Rain, Good Ba Ba, Ambitious Dragon and Able Friend. The New Zealand-bred raced as Montaigne in Australia where he won two of seven races for trainer Anthony Cummings and showed promise in three Group 1 contests, notably when second in the 1m2f Rosehill Guineas. That run marked him as a Hong Kong Derby (2000m) prospect. Sha Tin’s top four-year-old Classic race is the one that Hong Kong owners desire above all others. Patrick Kwok purchased the gelding through George Moore Bloodstock and renamed him with
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“Beauty Generation wasn’t a problem at first, but now I think he knows he’s good. He gets the VIP treatment – it’s gone to his head a bit! He’s the boss now”
the “Beauty” prefix applied to horses under the Kwok family ownership. Kwok’s racing-mad father Simon Kwok and mother Eleanor head the locally-famous Sa Sa cosmetics retail chain. Beauty Generation proved to be among the best of his crop in the spring of 2017 running third to the all-conquering but ill-fated Rapper Dragon in both the Hong Kong Classic Mile and the Hong Kong Derby. A track-record win in a 2200m Class 2 handicap thereafter suggested a future as a classy HK stayer. “The trainer and jockey told me he would be a stayer and maybe a Group 3 horse or Group 2 at best,” says Kwok, 26. That all changed when Beauty Generation opened the 2017-18 season with surprising frontrunning wins in Group race handicaps at 7f and a mile and then snared the Group 1 Hong Kong Mile itself. He added further Group 1 scores in the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Cup (1400m) and Champions Mile to claim Horse of the Year honours over Pakistan Star. This season has been even better: at the time of writing he is unbeaten in five races. He demolished his rivals in the same Group race handicaps as a year earlier but this time off top-weight; he smashed Good Ba Ba’s mile track record in the Group 2 Jockey Club Mile at Sha Tin, despite hanging the width of the straight; he toyed with his rivals to win a second Hong Kong
