Tim and Nancy Hamlin

It takes a pretty serious animal to earn $2 million in any racing jurisdiction, let alone accomplishing that feat in a place like Hong Kong. The urban environment is not for every horse--to that end, the Hong Kong Jockey Club operates their state-of-the-art satellite facility in Conghua [shung-pha] on the Chinese mainland--and it takes a special horse to thrive there. Chancheng Glory (Mor Spirit) has done just that over the course of the last 18 months or so. Bred in Iowa by Allen Poindexter, the 4-year-old gelding has won seven...

"Her dad should have shot me," says Tim Hamlin wryly. Needless to say, he had met Nancy at a horseshow. She had just started out on her veterinary studies. "And she quit school to come to a little town in northwest Iowa to help me," Hamlin recalls. "This was '84, we were kids, had no money. We lived in a single wide trailer house for seven years. Nancy would get up at 4 a.m. to make donuts, so we could buy horsefeed." Eventually they found a filly that emboldened a...