Lightning strikes twice in more ways than one for the Pope family

Cover image courtesy of Blue Gum Farm

It was only four years ago that the Pope family were on cloud nine after a colt they bred and part-owned, Ideas Man (Brazen Beau), landed the lucrative R. Listed Inglis Banner on debut, and on Saturday the family scaled the very same dizzy heights when exciting filly Bold Bastille followed in the footsteps of her three-quarter brother to run out an even more impressive winner of the $500,000 contest.

This time there was a layer of added satisfaction, however, as Bold Bastille’s dominant display came less than 24 hours after another horse bred by the Pope family, Peter Moody’s talented mare She Dances, recorded her seventh career success in the Listed Chautauqua S. at The Valley.

To top it off, Deanna Pope is also a shareholder in Bold Bastille’s Lindsay Park-trained stablemate Blue Allure (Blue Point {Ire}), who as the first all female-owned horse across the line in the R. Listed Inglis Banner, picked up the $200,000 Inglis Pink Bonus for her troubles.

As far as days go, it couldn’t have gone much more to plan for Pope and her family, whose broodmare band continues to punch above its weight from such small numbers.

“Watching She Dances win on Friday night after winning at Caulfield in a Group 3 two weeks ago was amazing, and then for this filly Bold Bastille to come out and win the way she did on Saturday was incredible,” Pope said.

“To be able to have two horses like that running around that we bred from not very big numbers is pretty amazing. My family, which includes my dad Des, my two sisters and my brother-in-law, we have eight broodmares that we breed from and we used to stand Rubiton as a stallion, so we have quite a bit of his blood through those two girls.

“I’m also in Lindsay’s Park’s other horse, who won the ladies' bonus, so it has been a pretty amazing day. We couldn’t be happier.”

Bold and beautiful

Just as they did with Ideas Man, the Pope family opted to retain a share in Bold Bastille, who was secured by her trainers in conjunction with Mathew Becker’s Group 1 Bloodstock (FBAA) for $270,000 from the Blue Gum Farm draft at this year’s Inglis Premier Yearling Sale.

Racing in the colours of leviathan owner Ozzie Kheir, Bold Bastille had always been held in high regard by the team at Blue Gum, and when Ben and JD Hayes asked Pope to remain in the ownership shortly after her sale, the decision to say yes could not have been any easier.

“When all the foals are born up at Blue Gum, Philip Campbell would always be like, ‘This is the pick of the bunch this year’, and Bold Bastille was always the one that we knew people would be wanting,” Pope recalled.

“The Hayes team really love this filly and when they bought her they were so keen to have her. The boys asked us to stay in her and we were very happy to do so.

“I went up to see the two fillies in the stalls on Saturday and JD (Hayes) walked past and said, ‘Thanks for breeding our fast filly’. He just knew, even when they bought her he said, ‘I think she’s just going to be fast’, that’s just how they saw her from the beginning.

“Every step of the way she has done everything right - every trial, every bit of work, it has just been no problem for her. I know they thought that she could win, but I don’t know if they really thought she was going to win like that. It was definitely beyond my expectations!”

Less than 24 hours earlier, Pope had witnessed a similarly dominant display from Bold Bastille’s close relation She Dances, who is another horse that continues to exceed all expectations.

A daughter of the Lonhro mare Charleston Dancer, who is a half-sister to the dam of Bold Bastille, She Dances recorded her second stakes victory on the bounce when easily accounting for fellow Blue Gum Farm graduate Semillion (Shalaa {Ire}) by 1.5l, with Linda Meech only needing hands and heels to guide the progressive mare to her seventh career success.

It all augurs well for the soon-to-be-born full sibling to She Dances, who is a mare that has still yet to reach her ceiling in the eyes of Pope.

“She just keeps getting stronger and stronger, and everything they put in front of her she just steps up to another level,” Pope said of She Dances.

“I don’t know what her limit is, but I’m very excited to see her every time she goes around. Every time she wins I text Peter Moody to say congratulations as if I’m an owner, because I couldn’t be more excited for them.

“Charleston Dancer has gone to Snitzel the previous two years and then last year we sent her back to Street Boss, so I’ve got my fingers crossed for a little filly coming in the next couple of weeks, which would be a full sister to She Dances.

“Once she started showing us something we thought we better go back there. She hasn’t foaled yet but she’ll be going back to Street Boss again this year as well, we feel like that might be a winning formula.”

Special significance

Deciding on mating plans for the family’s small group of broodmares is something that Pope does in conjunction with her father Des, who kickstarted the family’s involvement in breeding by investing in four-time Group 1 winner and G1 Cox Plate hero Rubiton when he retired to stud at Mike Willesee’s Trans Media Park in 1988.

Rubiton moved south in 1995 to Victoria’s Blue Gum Farm, where he would go on to sire a total of 43 stakes winners and seven Group 1 scorers during a successful career in the stallion barn. The move was the start of a fruitful and long-lasting relationship between the Pope family and Blue Gum, one which is still going strong to this day under the farm’s new management and ownership.

At 88 years young, Pope’s father Des remains an integral part of the family’s breeding interests and was trackside at The Valley on Saturday to witness the impressive debut of Bold Bastille, a filly who he is particularly fond of given his affinity for Darley’s Group 1-producing sire Brazen Beau.

“We breed a lot through Darley, a lot of our mares go to their stallions and we have quite a good relationship with Andy Makiv there,” Pope said.

“My dad and I will normally sit down and look at what we’ve got and what we have coming through, and Andy will go through the stallions with us and we’ll pick the ones that we think will hopefully go best with those mares.

“My dad is 88 and he was getting a bit disillusioned with our breeding, so I just really wanted Bold Bastille to win for him. He was there on Saturday, he didn’t come down to the mounting yard but they brought the trophy up and a couple of the owners came up to see him, so he still feels part of it.

“He is still really involved and he loves his racing today as much as anyone. To have some good horses that we bred winning stakes races, I think that just gives him an extra pep in his step. It’s incredible for him and I’m just learning from him every day.”

Rollercoaster ride

Having enjoyed plenty of early success as a breeder courtesy of the likes of G1 Newmarket H. hero Rubitano (Rubiton), the Pope family have subsequently experienced the full range of emotions in their breeding venture over the years.

The highs of Group 1 wins and selling two yearlings for $575,000 and $450,000 apiece at the Inglis Premier Yearling Sale in 2019 have been met by plenty of lows along the way, which is precisely what makes results like this weekend so special for Pope and her father.

Gallery: The 2019 yearling sale season was a successful one for the Pope family, images courtesy of Inglis

“When we had Rubitano, Innovation Girl and Great Glen running, we were just breeding and winning, and Dad says he thought we knew what we were doing,” she said.

“It has been really up and down since then, there is so much luck involved in racing and it’s just a matter of getting the right horse at the right time and having them stay sound. There are so many steps that go into getting a horse to the track and Dad knows now that he can give a horse the best breeding, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to be a winner.

“Everyone knows in breeding that you’re looking at a three-year plan and trying to work out what is going to be fashionable in three years’ time. The year we sold Ideas Man and Larimer Street for over a million dollars for the pair Dad was like, ‘Oh my God, we got it right this year’. It does make him very happy to know that he has made some right choices down the track.”

One such choice that has proven to be a masterstroke for the Pope family has been the decision to retain the aforementioned Innovation Girl (Rubiton), who features prominently in the pedigrees of both She Dances and Bold Bastille as their grandam.

By Rubiton out of the multiple stakes placegetter Bright Gleam (Jugah), who was also bred by Pope, Innovation Girl was a ripper of a racemare on the track, winning 10 of her 15 career starts for trainer Brian Mayfield-Smith including seven at stakes level, with her finest hour coming as a 3-year-old in the G2 Ascot Vale S. - a race now known as the Coolmore Stud S. and afforded Group 1 status.

Innovation Girl proved to be equally as potent as a broodmare, producing a trio of stakes horses herself, while her daughters have taken on that mantle with aplomb, producing a further four stakes horses and counting.

The Pope family sadly lost the apple of their eye when she passed away from colic a week before Ideas Man, who proved to be her final foal, landed the R. Listed Inglis Banner on debut, but each time the progeny of her daughters step out on the racetrack, Pope is reminded of just how special a mare Innovation Girl was to the family.

“She was always one of our favourite fillies when she raced and one of our favourite broodmares, and now her bloodlines are really starting to come through,” Pope said.

“I remember Brian Mayfield Smith wasn’t really a fan of Innovation Girl and said that maybe we should try and sell her, which we couldn’t, so we ended up holding 90 per cent of her. She was the first 2-year-old that we ever raced and Dad was really not a fan of 2-year-olds, but she was just showing us something that we’d never had before.

“I still look back at what she has done over her career and every so often I have to have a reminder of how good she was. I sometimes think if she had gotten past her 3-year-old season, what would she have done for us? You do forget how good they were as time goes on.

“Having her granddaughters win just reminds us where it has all actually come from. I feel like She Dances and Bold Bastille are showing what Innovation Girl showed us 22 years ago, and it’s so exciting.”

Difficult decisions

The Pope family are well positioned to continue Innovation Girl’s legacy long into the future, with her stakes-winning daughter Chloe In Paris (Exceed And Excel), who was fifth in the G1 The Galaxy in 2015, and her winning daughter Bossy Chloe (Street Boss {USA}), likely to prove key members of the broodmare band for the foreseeable future.

Commercial realities dictate that the family cannot keep hold of all of their stock, however, and luckily for Pope, she gets just as much joy from seeing horses they have sold as yearlings go on to enjoy success for their new connections.

“Someone said to me the other day, ‘Why did you sell She Dances?’, but we don’t breed a lot and we might only end up with two or three that end up in the sale, so we have to make decisions on them,” she said.

“To me, if they’re winning for somebody else it’s just as good as if they’re winning for us. If we let a good one go occasionally it’s great for us, because hopefully the She Dances’ owners are going to come back again and look at our next filly.

“Now people know our mares and they know our horses. We don’t have that many and I think we only have two going to (Inglis) Premier this year, but hopefully they are two that people are looking out for.”

With full siblings to both She Dances and Bold Bastille on the way, the Pope family will once again find themselves in the enviable yet difficult position of deciding which ones to sell and which ones to keep. It’s a constant balancing act, but it’s one that Pope wouldn’t change for the world.

“We don’t really have a plan, because sometimes it depends on how many we have racing and how many foals and yearlings we have,” she revealed.

“For a few years we had fillies, fillies, fillies, so we sold Rue Vivienne, who was actually another Chloe In Paris filly, because we had Bossy Chloe coming through.

“We had to weigh that up and if we have too many fillies we’ll keep the ones that we really want to keep. Chloe In Paris’ next two foals are by Snitzel and they’re both fillies, so that gives us the option of keeping one and selling one, and Peter Moody has the first one.

“Balancing out our broodmares is a big part of what we keep and what we sell. Every year is very different. We think we have a pattern and then the next year is different.”

If there is a pattern to be observed from the past few years, it’s that the Pope family certainly knows how to breed a good racehorse.