After tragic death of America's Joy, owner Amanda Pope has no 'Derby Fever' with Charge It
Eight months since the fatal fall of a prize filly, Amanda Pope has yet to scatter the ashes of America’s Joy.
The cremated remains of American Pharoah’s daughter still rest in a large metal box on a shelf in Pope’s Florida office, a reminder of the risks and the heartache inherent in owning horses.
“It was the worst thing that ever happened and I’m very thankful that I was not there,” Pope said. “If I had been there, there’s no telling what I would have done. I may have quit racing. It’s that devastating.”
Known for her penchant for paying sale-topping prices at equine auctions, the 67-year-old Pope prefers to think of her horses in maternal rather than monetary terms. She calls them her “children,” and worries about their welfare like a mother entrusting her infant to a babysitter for the first time.
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She has been conflicted about entering her colt Charge It in the Kentucky Derby, apprehensive about the 20-horse field and the “havoc” that can be caused by those that don’t belong, and not afflicted “one iota” by the obsession that often overtakes owners around the first Saturday in May.
When Charge It won for the first time in February, outclassing a Gulfstream field by 8 ½ lengths, Pope pointedly told her team she did not have Derby Fever.
“I don’t care if I don’t go to the Derby,” she said. “I might even be happier if I don’t go to the Derby. I said I’m only going if the horse pulls us there and it looks as if he has a real legitimate chance. I didn’t want to push him. I wanted him to be sound and here we go.”
Runner-up in the Florida Derby after an inauspicious start, Charge It is only Pope’s second Derby horse, following Mylute, the fifth-place finisher in 2013. Though Pope’s Whisper Hill Farm has been among America’s most aggressive thoroughbred buyers for a decade, her tendency to take the long view and her willingness to wait for a racehorse to mature sometimes leaves advisors “slightly aggravated with me,” she said.
“Mandy is a breeder at heart,” said Todd Quast, Whisper Hill’s general manager. “It’s taken her some time to acquire these mares and the foals that come out of the mares, they don’t (always) run themselves. It’s the next generation that does. So it’s taken time.”
“Hers is a little different approach,” said Todd Pletcher, Charge It’s Hall of Fame trainer. “Plenty of people have tried to build their foundation around good broodmares and she’s done it at a pretty high level. She’s obviously focusing on high-quality mares with good race records and she’s going about it the right way..
“She cares a lot about her horses. She’s very patient. Not everyone would take that approach.”
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Charge It represents a return on an investment Pope made in 2013. She spent $2.2 million on a yearling filly that September at Keeneland and, once the filly became a mare, bred I’ll Take Charge to the standout sire Tapit. Pope had previously paid $10 million for Horse of the Year Havre de Grace in 2012 at a Fasig-Tipton sale – a world record for a broodmare prospect – before dropping another $4.2 million the following day on Kentucky Oaks winner Plum Pretty.
“Probably the worst part of it all was the media attention it garnered,” she said of her headline-grabbing buys. “It’s become a reputation that I haven’t relished. I prefer the reputation of someone who works very hard. When I do this, I’ll buy one horse instead of six or seven.
“My thought was they all cost the same amount of money to take care of, but breeding the best mare to the best stallion, if you look at the statistics, you have a higher chance of getting a great racehorse.”
Co-owner of Variety Wholesalers, a company whose more than 400 retail outlets include two Roses discount stores in Louisville, Pope has stocked her stable with some of the priciest horseflesh in the hemisphere. Five times in the last nine years, Pope has bought either the most expensive filly or colt at Keeneland’s September yearling sale, including America’s Joy, whose $8.2 million sale was the highest price paid in any Keeneland auction during the last 10 years.
To get her, Pope had to outbid Godolphin’s Sheik Mohammed, the ruler of Dubai, and the big spenders at Spendthrift Farm.
“She was everything,” Pope said. “I brought her to be a broodmare. Hopefully, she would be a racehorse, but as a broodmare she already had the potential with the pedigree that she had. For her to win a stakes race or any race was going to be icing on the cake, along with being very exciting, of course.”
America’s Joy was near the end of a final breeze before a planned Labor Day debut when she fractured a sesamoid bone in her left foreleg last Aug. 29, falling and breaking her neck at Saratoga. It fell to Quas to break the news to Pope.
“I could tell in his voice right away that something was wrong,” she said. “He said, if you’re not sitting down, sit down. The only other time I had somebody say that was when I got the news from my father that my brother had passed away.
“It was horribly gut-wrenching. People don’t really understand the love and the devotion that we all feel for these horses. They’re our children. We love them.”
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That love has outlasted the lifespan of America’s Joy. Even now, Mandy Pope is not ready to let her go.
“She’s right there in the office with me every day,” she said. “At some time, I’ll spread her ashes out. Right now, it’s a reminder every day of how fragile these horses are and how attached you are. It’s going to take me a while to get unattached enough to go spread her ashes.”
Tim Sullivan: 502-582-4650, tsullivan@courier-journal.com; Twitter: @TimSullivan714
This article originally appeared on Louisville Courier Journal: After America's Joy's death, Amanda Pope's Charge It in Kentucky Derby
