Three days after the Hong Kong Derby, one of the highlights of the Hong Kong racing season, the stage lights will be much dimmer on the Happy Valley card Wednesday.

This is Hong Kong’s everyday racing product, not the big stage, and a trio of Class 3 handicaps, the last three races on the card, headline the nine-race program.

Race 8, for horses rated 80 to 60 and carded for 1,200 meters, brings out a product of intense trainer experimentation, a horse named Stock Legend. Francis Lui Kin-wai, a graduate of the Hong Kong apprentice jockeys’ school in the early 1970s and a licensed trainer since 1996, trains the best horse in Hong Kong and one of the top-rated horses in the world, Golden Sixty, but he might never have put more tinkering into a racehorse than he has with Stock Legend.

Four-year-old Stock Legend came to Hong Kong from Australia an unraced horse. During the 2019-20 Hong Kong season, his first racing, he made nine starts, all at the Class 4 level, and lost them all. Stock Legend started that campaign racing in blinkers, Lui adding a hood for five starts before taking it off again, having seen no real performance boost in his horse. Check out the equipment moves Lui has made with Stock Legend during the 2020-21 season: blinkers off, visor on, visor off, hood back on, first-time tongue tie.

Maybe all the experimentation has unlocked Stock Legend’s potential, and maybe he was just meant to get better with age, but for whatever reason, Stock Legend has won three of his last four starts, lugging 133 pounds to victory March 10 in a Class 4 at Happy Valley and finally graduating to the Class 3 level Wednesday night. He drew post 9, carries 122 pounds, and makes another change here, going from jockey Joao Moreira to Karis Teetan.

Moreira, Hong Kong’s leading rider, pops up here on a horse Teetan rode in his last two starts, Soaring Tower. Soaring Tower has made only three career starts, all in Hong Kong, and looked good in his first two, finishing second and first in a pair of Class 4 handicaps at Sha Tin. He was favored stepping up to Class 3 competition Jan. 1 at Sha Tin but bombed, coming home last of 14, a circumstance that always will result in a stewards’ inquiry into poor performance. Teetan reported that his mount came off the bit mid-race and essentially declined to produce an effort. To race again, Soaring Tower has had to pass a veterinary exam and satisfactorily participate in a barrier trial, or training race. Soaring Tower did so on Feb. 23, finishing first in his practice heat while ridden for the first time by Moreira.

Jockey change, first time racing at Happy Valley – just two changes for Soaring Tower, far fewer than Stock Legend has experienced.