Eddie Rosen, Repole’s man, explains the mating that resulted in Fierceness
Repole Stable’s homebred champion 2-year-old colt makes season debut Saturday in G3 Holy Bull
By Sid Fernando
It’s a good time to be Eddie Rosen, general manager of Mike Repole’s Repole Stable. The outfit was represented by two Eclipse Award winners last month: champion juvenile colt Fierceness, a homebred son of City of Light; and Up to the Mark, a Not This Time auction purchase who was named the champion turf horse.
That success was a continuation from the year before, when the stable was also represented by two Eclipse winners. Forte, by Violence, was the champion 2-year-old colt like Fierceness; and Nest, by Curlin, was the champion 3-year-old filly.
In 2019, Vino Rosso, a son of Curlin, won the Eclipse as champion older dirt male for the stable. Prior to that, Repole’s only champion was the Indian Charlie horse Uncle Mo, the champion juvenile colt of 2010 and now a leading sire at Coolmore America.
Except for Uncle Mo and Fierceness, Repole’s other champions were raced in partnership. Up to the Mark, Forte, and Vino Rosso were raced with Vinny Viola’s St. Elias Stable, and Nest was owned with Eclipse Thoroughbred Partners and Michael House.
Repole Stable has quickly become a major force in N. America mostly through its auction purchases, but expect more success for Repole-bred runners in the future, too.
Fierceness, who runs on Saturday in the G3 Holy Bull Stakes at Gulfstream, is the stable’s first homebred champion and the second Grade 1 winner it has bred after G1 Wood Memorial winner Outwork, a son of Uncle Mo.
Although he is one of the leading auction buyers of yearlings in N. America, Mike Repole is growing his broodmare band, and Eddie Rosen, a lifelong student of pedigrees with an impeccable track record for picking out such notable auction purchases as Tale of the Cat ($375,000), More Than Ready ($187,000), and English Channel ($50,000), among others, from limited opportunity is in charge of mating those mares.
An attorney for more than 50 years, Rosen, who is in his late 70s, is now a full-time employee of Repole Stables and oversees a team that Repole has put together for expansion that includes Jacob West, Jim Martin, Danielle Bricker, and, for about a year now, Alex Solis II and Madison Scott. Todd Pletcher, who has trained all of the Repole champions, is, of course, a key member of Repole’s buying team that got Up to the Mark for $450,000; Forte for $110,000; Nest for $350,000 (Repole later bought out his partners in Nest for $6 million last year at auction); Vino Rosso for $410,000; and Uncle Mo for $220,000.
For Repole’s breeding operation, however, Rosen is front and center. He said that for the matings this year, he worked with Solis, but in the past he was the one primarily tasked with picking stallions for the Repole mares.
Back when Fierceness was conceived, Repole had about 25 mares, according to Rosen; now, he has 45 mares.
FIERCENESS (2021 City of Light – Nonna Bella, by Stay Thirsty)
B: Repole Stable
O: Repole Stable
T: Todd Pletcher
Record: 3-2-0-0, $1,102,750
Highest achievement: Champion 2-year-old colt
How did Rosen pick City of Light, a horse neither owned by Repole nor trained by Pletcher, for the Stay Thirsty mare Nonna Bella, the dam of Fierceness?
“Mike wants us to patronize the sires we either own or have positions in,” Rosen said. Repole had purchased shares in City of Light, Accelerate, and West Coast at Lane’s End, but even counting his interests in other horses, Repole didn’t have a large portfolio of stallions for Rosen to choose from.
“My job was to line up the mares with the stallions we had to use,” Rosen said, “and I’m trying to figure out who’s going to go with who. Well, I thought [G1 Alabama Stakes winner] Dunbar Road was terrific, and she was by Quality Road — the sire of City of Light — over Bernardini [the sire of Dunbar Road’s dam, Gift List]. And this mating is the son of Quality Road over a daughter of Stay Thirsty — a son of Bernardini. So that’s how I got to it.”
Rosen said: “Look, some of it is being lucky, but it’s always good to be luckier than smart. When I first came around — and you know how old I am — the big nick was Nasrullah over Princequillo. Some said that was sort of a fortuitous thing because they both stood at Claiborne, and they were breeding Princequillo mares to Nasrullah. It may not have been a great nick, but they made it into a great nick, so in some ways this was a similar thing. I had to use someone we had a position in with a mare we had. We hit with it.”
In fact, after Nonna Bella was bred to City of Light in 2020, the fledgling nick struck again when Emblem Road, a Quality Road colt from a Bernardini mare, won the G1 Saudi Cup — the world’s richest race — in 2022. Fierceness is now the third Grade 1 winner bred on the Quality Road/Bernardini cross.
With 45 mares to mate in 2024, Rosen doesn’t have the same constraints as he did in 2020. “We’re going to some outside stallions this year. We’re using Curlin, as well as Into Mischief and Not This Time. We also have shares in Life Is Good, so we’re using him as well,” Rosen said. Of course, Forte is available now, and Rosen said other stallions that Repole has positions in will also be used.
Repole has been breeding some horses for a while — note that Repole bred the dam of Fierceness as well — but with a newly focused approach, the owner has been buying mares with a purpose. “We have a Deep Impact mare from Japan, mares from Europe, mares from South America,” Rosen noted. “Mike thinks — and I agree — that we need more international bloodlines to mix with ours, and he’s been going about doing that. Of course, this doesn’t mean that he won’t be buying yearlings, which is a team effort. By the way, Mike is big on teamwork. Mike seeks input from all of us for decision making, but Mike makes the ultimate decisions. He’s just going to be breeding more now, and those horses will be entered in sales. Fierceness was, for example, entered in a sale until Mike made the decision — a great decision — to scratch him from the sale. But there’s an Uncle Mo yearling we bred and sold that I recently saw on a farm in Ocala, and they think she’s the best 2-year-old filly on the farm. So, we’ll see.”
What we’ll probably see are more Repole-bred stakes winners down the road.