Ameeta Mehra of India’s Usha Stud was Nick’s guest in this week’s Weatherbys bloodstock segment.
Nick Luck first spoke to Ameeta Mehra, chair and managing director of Usha Stud in northern India, around four years ago. She was back on the podcast this week.
“I think it was our first visit to India on the podcast,” Luck said of Ameeta Mehra’s first appearance, “and it certainly wasn’t our last. It prompted a real interest in the Indian bloodstock scene that Ameeta has done so much to burnish since she took over Usha Stud in extraordinary circumstances many years ago.”
The circumstances to which Luck was referring involve a 2001 helicopter crash. It killed Mehra’s father, the stud’s founder and international polo player Major Pradeep Kumar Mehra, her mother and a younger sister.
Mehra, who said she was “very happy” to be back on the podcast, told Luck there had been “quite a lot of progress” since they last spoke.
“Let me first talk about the bigger picture,” she began. “A lot of top stallions have been imported into the country by various stud farms. We’ve horses like Economics, Territories and Chindit.”
Mehra said India had also been importing 100-odd broodmares from sales at Goffs and Tattersalls each year.
“There has been a tremendous push up when it comes to the genetics and bloodstock that India has been importing,” she stated.
Asked why Britain and Ireland appeared the best source of horses likely to excel in India, Mehra responded that India’s turf-only racing scene was probably a driver.
She also said it was for reasons of geography, with the UK and Ireland sitting closer to India than the countries such as the USA.
First season, three Classic winners
Thirteen-year-old Deauville heads the Usha stallion roster and was crowned India’s leading first-season sire in 2024-25, an accolade that Mehra said “meant a lot” given that Multidimensional, one of her previous stallions and a reigning champion for “many, many years”, was forced to retire with fertility issues.
“I needed a good successor,” explained Mehra, “so I bought Deauville thinking that, with him being a Group 1 winner by Galileo, he’d do well with my Danehill mares. I think that has proved correct because Deauville, when you give him sprinting mares, is throwing fast horses. When you give him staying or middle-distance mares, he’s throwing Classic winners.”
When Luck suggested that, as Deauville has had three Classic winners from his first crop, Mehra was being “quite modest”, she admitted that “in the given circumstances” it “is an achievement, especially as some of the racecourses haven’t been functioning, meaning their Derbies haven’t happened.”
Bringing India to the world
Mehra said her “key ambition” was to take Indian-based horses abroad, to compete “in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and other countries, even England if possible” in order to “really see how competitive they are in other jurisdictions.”
She also said it was an ambition to organise an international meeting in India, to which horses from other jurisdictions would be invited.
“That seems to be the next step,” she explained, “because otherwise we’re going to be in our own world. We need competition to spur us on and get us more motivated.”
Asked if the overall quality of Indian stock was improving sufficiently, Mehra said she thought the phenotype of Indian stock, in terms of “confirmation, bone, substance and quality” is “clearly equivalent” to what she’d seen abroad, “if not, in some cases, even better.”
She admitted, however, that Indian racing doesn’t yet know how its horses would fare when put against foreign competition, and that they’d “only get to know” when they “actually start running against each other.”
“We need competition to spur us on and get us more motivated.” - Ameeta Mehra
Concluding with reflections on the accident that killed her father, the anniversary of which fell on 2nd January this year, Mehra said she felt the blessings of both her parents and the divine in her work, because she “certainly couldn’t have done it alone.”
She added that whenever she finds herself in difficulty, she looks “inwardly” for what her father would’ve done, seeking his advice.
“I’ve often found that in times of conflict and choices, his words start ringing in my ears,” she explained. “The foundations were there and now I’m beginning to understand why.”
To people who tell told her she’s done better than her father, Mehra says she responds simply by saying she’s only “standing on his shoulders”.
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