Lope De Vega is having a stellar run in Australia bringing his tally to 4 Group 1 wins despite an end to his shuttling when Patinack Farm bit the dust, for now Lope De Vega is standing at Ballylinch Stud for a fee of 125,000 Euro almost $200,000 AUD.
Only rarely does a stallion emerge like Lope de Vega, who has simply never missed a beat in establishing himself as a bona fide global influence.
Lope de Vega’s ascent has been so inexorable that his latest juveniles were conceived at a fee still only half that he had reached by 2019. Yet they included his 11th and 12th Group 1 winners, as the outstanding heir to Shamardal once again racked up elite performers at a relentless rate. Heading towards the end of the year, in fact, Lope de Vega had assembled more Group winners in 2020 than the likes of Frankel, Siyouni and Kingman.
To describe his influence as ‘global,’ moreover, is no kind of stretch. He crowned the year with the sensational Breeders’ Cup success of Aunt Pearl, who proved herself in a different class in the Juvenile Fillies’ Turf. Rivals assembled from the cream of the crop, either side of the ocean, shared the same unavailing pursuit as she opened up from the front, with the race already sewn up turning for home. As an American export from Tattersalls Book I, Aunt Pearl will only drive a growing international demand for Lope de Vega – whose daughter Newspaperofrecord had produced a similarly striking exhibition in the same race a couple of years previously.
And don’t forget the stellar impact he continues to achieve through a brief shuttling stint earlier in his career. A third Group 1 sprint winner in Australia, indeed, reiterates how only class comes as standard in Lope de Vega. Though his 125 stakes horses include four champion juveniles and a 2,000 Guineas winner, he has sufficiently stretched the speed he showed himself – as a brilliant dual Classic winner – to get top-class animals in nearly any discipline.
That was also much how things were with the farm’s founding father, The Tetrarch. And as an outcross eligible for the very best mares in the world, Lope de Vega is already promising to create a lasting legacy of his own.
But the Champion son of Lope De Vega, Endless Drama is now at Larneuk in Victoria.
We only got to see ENDLESS DRAMA race a few times in Australia where he finished 3rd to Winx in the Group 2 Apollo, won the Apollo the following year and later grabbed 3rd in the Group 1 Stradbroke. However, he was a multiple Group 2 winner in New Zealand AND multiple Group 1 placed behind absolute superstars Gleneagles and Belardo in the UK.
Endless Drama will stand at $8,800 with a limited number of breeding rights available.
