Hope Road Retires as Millionaire After Grade 1 Ballerina Stakes Win

Seven years separated the wins, but nothing else did. When Hope Road won the Grade 1 Resorts World Casino Ballerina Stakes at Saratoga on August 23, 2025, beating Breeders' Cup Distaff winner Scylla by two lengths in the $500,000 race, Barbara Perry captured it plainly: "The same connections, seven years later, we come back and we win."

Now those same connections are moving on. Hall of Fame trainer Bob Baffert confirmed Hope Road's retirement on April 6, with the news first reported by owners Barbara and Ron Perry to Daily Racing Form's Steve Anderson. The 4-year-old bay filly exits with a record of 6-4-2 from 14 starts and lifetime earnings of $1,016,620, clearing the million-dollar threshold that separates accomplished from elite.

The timing reads as deliberate. Hope Road signed off with a 6½-length rout of the Grade 3 Bayakoa Stakes at Del Mar, the most dominant performance of her career. She posted three official workouts in January 2026 and never re-entered competition. At 4, with a Grade 1 on her résumé and that Bayakoa margin announcing that nothing was left to prove, the Perrys are cashing out at exactly the right moment.

The economic logic is almost self-evident. Hope Road is a Kentucky homebred by Quality Road, who stands at Lane's End Farm for $150,000. Her dam, Marley's Freedom, was purchased as a yearling at Keeneland September for $35,000 before winning the 2018 Grade 1 Ballerina. The Grade 1 stamp on Hope Road's page transforms her commercial profile entirely: breeders seeking to mate her with similarly priced stallions know they are dealing with a filly who has already validated the pedigree. A single foal from a top-tier mating could recoup her entire racing earnings in one auction ring transaction.

That calculus feeds directly into Barbara Perry's larger ambition. Perry has spoken openly about building Marley's Freedom into a blue-hen mare, the kind of foundational matriarch that produces Grade 1 performers across generations, an idea she traces to the theories of legendary Italian breeder Federico Tesio. Cicero Farms' 20 broodmares are boarded at Tom VanMeter's Pretty Run Farm in Winchester, Kentucky, and with Hope Road joining that band, the operation now has a mother-daughter pair of Grade 1 Ballerina winners under the same roof. Consignor Headley VanMeter put the achievement in plain terms: "The one thing that's so cool for the breeders (Ron and Barbara Perry) is that they're small breeders."

Hope Road is the first of Marley's Freedom's foals to race. The dam has since produced an unraced filly by Medaglia d'Oro and a colt by Uncle Mo, meaning the depth of this family remains largely theoretical. Hope Road just made it considerably less so.

Baffert, the Breeders' Cup all-time leading trainer by purses won at over $42 million, trained both mares to their Ballerina victories. After the August win he said: "I'm so proud of [her]. She deserved a Grade I. Jose [Ortiz] rode her perfectly." Ortiz was Hope Road's regular partner throughout her career; Mike Smith had ridden Marley's Freedom to the 2018 Ballerina by 3¼ lengths.

Beyond the Ballerina, Hope Road's final résumé includes a runner-up finish in the Grade 1 Derby City Distaff at Churchill Downs, a third in the Grade 1 Breeders' Cup Filly and Mare Sprint, and a five-length demolition of the Grade 3 Torrey Pines Stakes at Del Mar in 2024. Three Grade 1 efforts, two on the podium, one in the winner's circle, from a breeding program built on 20 mares. The Perrys spent $35,000 on the family's foundation. What they built on it is now a Grade 1-producing dynasty in the making.