"There must be a good chance that Ouija Board is a bit tired now. And anyway we've beaten her before in Dubai. 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," says McKeown, who rode winners in Hong Kong during a stint in 1992.

In the intervening years, the 46-year-old has been better known for his exploits round the lesser British tracks. That is, until Collier Hill came along.

"I only wish he had happened to me ten years earlier," the jockey sighs.

The Collier Hill story starts in 2001 when, as an unraced cast-off from Classic-winning trainer John Gosden, he was sent to the Ascot Sales and fetched the equivalent of HK$75,000. 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 - he was very small and there seemed precious little scope about him. I wondered if I had made a mistake,"

Swinbank recalls.

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 - more commonly known as a 'bumper' - designed for horses deemed too slow to win on the Flat en route to a career over jumps.

Starting as joint-second favourite, he won his debut at Catterick, showing enough ability to merit a try back on the Flat.

Swinbank says: "He started to do his work so easily, and we soon realised that he was a serious machine."

Then came the wins. Small ones followed by richer prizes 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. It was the summer of 2004 and Collier Hill was just getting started.

Meanwhile Mckeown had been campaigning persistently for the ride, and as trainer Swinbank later acknowledges: "Dean may not be a fashionable jockey but he 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. McKeown reminisces: "The ground was rock hard and most people thought he liked it soft. At one stage he was 20 lengths off [runner-up] Foreign Affairs, but then he just took off like he was on rails. It was amazing and he got home a nose in front."

Bizarrely, his richest paydays have come as a seven and eight-year-old. Big race exploits include 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. But the greatest prize came with that superb Canadian International victory in late October, pushing the career earnings of this extraordinary horse to just short of HK$24 million.

Does this make Collier Hill racing's Sale Of The Century? Almost, but perhaps Takeover Target just shades that title for now. Who's arguing anyway?

How gratifying to witness at one of the richest meetings in the sport that global success and a lifetime of memories can still be found in the bargain basement.

HKJC Media Release Published 07/12/06