We’re With Rogue Passion In The Fillies’ Mile
Everyone’s talking about Musical Times, and they’ve every right to. She’s unbeaten in three for Charlie Appleby. She won first time out at Newmarket, followed up at Yarmouth, then went to Doncaster for the Group 2 May Hill Stakes and won it by seven and a half lengths. Appleby says she handled everything, that the race was faultless, and that he sees her as a 1,000 Guineas filly. She’s a daughter of Lope De Vega, William Buick rides, and she goes to Newmarket on Friday as the odds-on favourite. We understand why. Seven and a half lengths in a Group 2 is a serious performance.
But we’re putting our neck out. We’re with ROGUE PASSION.
A year ago she was a yearling in the sale ring at Goffs, knocked down for €90,000. She’s a filly by Sioux Nation out of a Frankel mare, Vazire, and she’s trained in Yorkshire by Ed Bethell, a trainer having a season to remember. Four starts, two wins and a second, and she’s improved every time she’s been asked a harder question. When she got off the mark at Carlisle in August, they went slowly and nothing suited her. Bethell said she’d get another furlong and be a lot better in a better race.
He was right. Four weeks later she won the Group 2 Prix d’Aumale at ParisLongchamp over a mile under Rossa Ryan, beating Amusingly by a neck, with the favourite Data further back in third. Ryan said she quickened up well and really knuckled down. Bethell called it not unexpected.
That’s the reason we’re with her. Her form has been tested since, at the very top level, and it’s stood up. On Arc weekend, both of those fillies went back to ParisLongchamp and ran in Group 1s. Amusingly took on the colts in the Prix Jean-Luc Lagardère and beat them, coming from last to first under Colin Keane. Data was beaten a head in a photo finish for the Prix Marcel Boussac. So Rogue Passion has already beaten a Group 1 winner and a Group 1 runner-up, at a mile, in a Group 2. Musical Times has been brilliant, but no horse she’s beaten has gone on to do anything like that yet.
The market has made Friday a one-horse race. We don’t think it is. Ryan keeps the ride, she’s drawn four of eight, and Aidan O’Brien sends a team, so it won’t be easy. But she’s a Group 2 winner over the trip, with Frankel as her grandsire on her mother’s side and a trainer who said from the start she’d want a mile. On what the form has told us since Paris, she’s the one we want.
Friday matters beyond Friday, too. The Fillies’ Mile is run over the Rowley Mile at Newmarket, the same course and the same distance as next spring’s 1,000 Guineas, so this is the closest thing to a Guineas rehearsal any two-year-old filly gets. The race has a habit of producing Classic winners. Oh So Sharp won it in 1984 and the fillies’ Triple Crown the following year. Bosra Sham won it in 1995 and took the 1,000 Guineas the next spring. Minding won it in 2015, then won the Guineas and the Oaks. Appleby already talks about Musical Times as a Guineas filly. Amusingly, the filly Rogue Passion beat in Paris, is among the Guineas fancies after her Group 1. If Rogue Passion beats them on Friday, over that course and that trip, she won’t just be a Group 1 winner. She’ll be a Guineas filly too.
She runs for Rogues Gallery Racing, a syndicate started in 2014 by Tony Elliott and twelve friends who pooled their money for one horse. Members now come from the UK, Ireland, Spain and Australia, and they buy their shares at cost and keep them for life. The syndicate has a habit of finding horses well above their price tag. Rogue Millennium was bought for £35,000, won at Royal Ascot and Longchamp, and was sold for £1.6 million. Rogue Lightning cost £42,000 and was sold for £1 million. Rogue Passion could be the next chapter.
https://www.roguesgalleryracing.com/
Rogue Passion winning Group 2 in France – CLICK HERE