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If English stayer Collier Hill wins Sunday's Hong Kong Vase at Sha Tin it will cap a rags-to-riches tale to rival even that of Australia's Takeover Target.
Photo by Racing and Sports
And it might just happen for the remarkable eight-year-old, according to his jockey Dean McKeown.
"There must be a good chance that Ouija Board is a bit tired now and, anyway, we've beaten her before in Dubai," McKeown said.
"My horse becomes a champion when he travels abroad. He even changes colour into a deep chestnut.
"I knew we would win the Canadian International last time and I think we are the horse to beat on Sunday.
McKeown, who rode winners in Hong Kong during a stint in 1992, is now 46 and had been better known for his exploits round the lesser British tracks until Collier Hill came along.
"I only wish he had happened to me 10 years earlier," he said.
The Collier Hill story starts in 2001 when, as an unraced cast-off from trainer John Gosden, he was sent to the Ascot sales and fetched the equivalent of about $A15,000.
But even that paltry price did not at first seem a bargain to his new trainer Alan Swinbank, based in North Yorkshire.
"This little rabbit of a horse walks off the box and there seemed precious little scope about him - I wondered if I had made a mistake," Swinbank recalled.
For six months he was put into a field with a collection of other horses, waiting for a box to become available in Swinbank's then minor-league operation.
Collier Hill's first start was in a National Hunt flat race commonly known as a 'bumper' designed for horses deemed too slow to win on the flat en route to a career over jumps.
He won at Catterick showing enough ability to merit a genuine try on the flat.
"He started to do his work so easily, and we soon realised that he was a serious machine," Swinbank said.
Then came the wins such as the Old Newton Cup at Haydock.
Next he switched codes again and landed a maiden hurdle at Kelso, but soon after reverted to his apparent niche as an above-average flat handicapper.
McKeown had been campaigning persistently for the ride and as Swinbank later acknowledges the jockey was the one who took Collier Hill into a different league.
One of the team's most extraordinary wins came in Sweden in the 2004 Stockholm Cup when he came from 20 lengths off the leader he got home by a nose.
His richest paydays have come as a seven and eight-year-old including a classic victory in the Irish St Leger and he has twice been placed in successive Dubai Sheema Classics.
Back in Sweden two starts back he trounced his rivals by nine lengths for another Stockholm Cup before the greatest prize came with a superb win in the Canadian International in October, pushing the career earnings to just short of $A5 million.
How gratifying to find yet another champion can still be found in the bargain basement.