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The Singapore Turf Club has granted a one-day visiting jockey’s licence to Brazilian jockey Ruan Maia to ride at the EW Barker Trophy meeting this Friday, November 8.

The 31-year-old jockey has been booked by trainer Cliff Brown to ride Circuit Mission in the Group 2 EW Barker Trophy.

Maia is a two-time Macau champion jockey who rode at three separate one-day stints at Kranji. At his first visit in April 2018, the Brazilian landed the Group 2 Chairman's Trophy on Circuit Land for Lee Freedman. He returned for another two big-race assignments on the same horse later in the year, finishing third in the Group 1 Queen Elizabeth II Cup and second in the Group 1 Dester Singapore Gold Cup.

With a 13 years of riding experience, Maia has racked up more than 550 winners, around one third of which came in Macau where he relocated from his Sao Paulo base in September 2016.

He took the Taipa racing scene by storm right from the start, booting home 31 winners to finish fourth on the ladder at his first season before being crowned champion with 60 winners in the 2017-2018 season and 71 winners in the 2018-2019 season. He currently shares the same number of winners (nine) as fellow Brazilian Dayversom Barros, but leads on a countback for seconds.

Maia has won feature races both in Brazil and Macau. In his home land, his highest acclaims came in the 2016 Group 1 J Adhemar de Almeida Prado aboard Maraton in Sao Paulo, while the Group 1 Macau Gold Cup with River Control in 2018 and the Group 1 Chairman's Challenge Cup with Mister Kaopu in March rank among his top achievements in the former Portuguese enclave.

Maia goes to scale at 53kgs.