Cheltenham Festival gets underway next week as racing fans are treated to 28 races across four days. The action will take place from Tuesday 11 to Friday 14, with gates to open at 10:30am on each of the four days. It’ll begin with the Champion Day, followed by Style Wednesday. Following that is St Patrick’s Thursday. Then, on Friday, you have the Gold Cup Day – the “most prestigious trophy” in horse racing.
With a prize fund of a whopping £4.5 million to win at the end, there is a lot of money at stake for jockeys, trainers, and the horses themselves. In fact, there are a number of them that rake in fortunes, including the world’s richest, which has a whopping £18m in the bank. Romantic Warrior is a multiple Group 1 winning champion thoroughbred born in Ireland and trained in Hong Kong.
He is currently owned by Lau Pak Fai, trained by Danny Shum Chap Shing and under the jockey James McDonald, who is a member of the New Zealand Racing Hall of Fame.
Last year, Romantic Warrior won Hong Kong’s Horse of the Year, and the thoroughbred also won the Hong Kong Champion Middle-distance Horse honour for three years in a row between 2022 and 2024.
Just after the horse’s arrival in Hong Kong in 2021, he secured a five-winning streak, including a championship of the Hong Kong Classic Mile. Ever since that year, he has continued his successful streak.
In 2024, Romantic Warrior also won the Yasuda Kinen and became the first foreign-trained horse to win at the Toyko Racecourse since Bullish Luck in 2006.
Earlier this year, the highest-earning racehorse of all time missed out on adding another £7 million to his prize pot at the Saudi Cup, the world’s richest race, in Riyadh.
The event, which took place between February 21 and 22, saw Forever Young beating Romantic Warrior by a neck and earning him his Fourth Grade 1 title and first Grade 1 title outside Japan. However, the small loss doesn’t take away from the big earnings of the Romantic Warrior.
Jockey McDonald recently said of Romantic Warrior: “He’s just a superstar. He adapts to any circumstances during a race, to any pace and has a good turn of foot. He’s a very strong-minded horse. He could be a sprinter, that’s how fast he is.”
In December, he also branded the Romantic Warrior “the perfect racehorse.”
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