India Blog: More Mumbai, Poonawalla Stud

It's been a lot of late nights in Mumbai this week. But not in the fun way. After attending day-long sessions on Tuesday through Thursday of the 36th Asian Racing Conference, I was typically up well past midnight knocking out copy for the next day's TDN. That's not complaining–that's a job. Still, it was nice to get out of the hotel on Friday and see more of India, and the ARC put together a fitting end to the week with a trip to the Poonawalla family's Poonawalla Stud Farm in Pune, located about 95 miles southeast of Mumbai.

Poonawalla, led by the billionaire brothers Cyrus and Zavaray Poonawalla, is India's version of Coolmore–a dominant operation that has 12 times been champion breeder in the country.

With about 120 conference attendees signed on for the tour, we left the hotel around 8 a.m. and, loaded onto four buses, drove through the busy Friday morning traffic toward Mumbai's domestic airport. Just as it's been all week, the weather was perfect, a comfortable 75 degrees in the morning, and there were clear skies as we curved around the rocky Arabian Sea coast and onto the Bandra-Worli Sea Link, a 3.5-mile bridge that cuts across the mouth of Mahim Bay.

The drive was yet another look into Mumbai's dichotomy of rich and poor. As you exit the Bandra-Worli, itself a sleek, modern bridge, squatter shanties line a steep hill to the west, and as you make your way out to the airport you drive past five or six more slums. But something odd struck me about the tin shacks this morning that I hadn't noticed before: a good many of them had satellite dishes on their corrugated roofs. I looked it up later, and it's true–most of these domiciles are indeed wired or power. (A photo I took a little latter at the airport captured it well–between our runway and another, each carrying a $50 million plane, sat another small squatter village with lots of satellite dishes.)

The flight to Pune is very short–just 20 minutes–and gives a great view of the Sahyadri mountain range, which opens onto a plateau. As we flew over the rugged landscape, it almost looked like it could be California's high desert or somewhere in Arizona. Rows of windmills lined some hilltops, and there were several long, narrow lakes below.

We again boarded four clean white buses, and Ajay Anne, a Darley Flying Start grad and now a Dubai-based bloodstock agent, took the mic up front and offered some insight into India's breeding program, and into the Poonawalla operation. The stud was started in 1946 by Soli A. Poonawalla, with a dozen mares and one stallion. From its very first crop, the farm produced the Indian 2000 Guineas winner Fitzcall (Ind). But it wasn't until the late 1980s that Poonawalla really established itself as India's premier racing and breeding operation. It recorded its first Indian Derby winner as breeder in 1988, and for the next four years bred and/or raced the winner of that race. Poonawalla's ninth and latest Derby winner came in 2012, when the filly In the Spotlight (Alnasr Alwasheek {Ire}) beat the boys.

Despite the hour drive, you're really only on Pune's outskirts when you pull off the main thoroughfare and into the farm. But once you pass through a large arch gateway, it's a different story. Poonawalla Stud is lovely and well-kept, but without pretension. There are no elaborate stone walls, no barns that look like vacation homes. The fence posts are vinyl shipped in from America, while chain link fencing stretches between them (I haven't seen chain link used before for horse fencing, and we were told it was produced on the property.)

Poonawalla Stud is, in total, 500 acres, but split into three nonadjacent tracts. I was floored when I was told what land in Pune went for: $250,000 an acre. Not rupees. U.S. dollars. But I guess when you put five times the number of people in a landmass a third the size of the U.S., that's what happens. Regardless, it makes for buying consecutive tracts very hard, we were told.

January is India's driest month, and the Poonawallas rotate their paddocks to save irrigation water. There are 120 mares on the farm, and at this point in time, about 25 new yearlings (this is the Northern Hemisphere, if your geography is bad) and 25 juveniles. A group of youngsters came over to say high to the buses as they rolled in, and it's funny–because farms here breed all their mares to their own 2 or 3 stallions, the resulting foals can look very similar. This group looked like a batch of feel-good clones.

Running the show here is Simone Poonawalla. A daughter of Zavaray Poonawalla, Simone may be an heiress to one of India's biggest fortunes, but you wouldn't know it talking with her. She's friendly and unassuming, knows all the grooms by name, and loves to talk shop. She discusses OCDs and feeding regiments, the cost of Indian oats vs. Australian oats (the latter are cheaper here now, in case you're wondering), and has an encyclopedic knowledge of the farm's pedigrees.

Horses aren't sold at public auction in India like they are in other jurisdictions. Instead, buyers come out to the farm and work out a price with the breeder. In a particularly sweet deal for buyers, horses that are sold in the summer as yearlings are kept, cost free, by the Poonawalla until well into their 2-year-old years. Simone even begins the breaking process before the horses ship off to trainers (the 2-year-old program in India doesn't begin until September, so there's no rush to get them cranked).

One interesting aspect of the Poonawalla set-up is the presence of two long, fenced, straight gallops on either side of their weanling/yearling paddocks. When the horses are weanlings, the are sent out to these gallops in groups, and get early speed training by running a set distance once a week (without a rider, naturally).

“It takes them a time or two to figure it out, but they catch on really quickly,” said Simone. She said the babies develop better bone size and density, and that she hasn't experienced any issues with chips or the like, since they've been doing this.

“But it's interesting–I've seen horses that later went on to become champions who would just be lazy out there and run five lengths behind the pack, so it's not very useful in determining who will be the good ones,” she said. “But you can see their action and judge their soundness, and hear if they have any breathing issues.”

After a terrific lunch–the passed champagne was an '05 Dom Pérignon–the Poonawallas moved everyone to a paddock that had a long, high tent with seating underneath. The farm's best mares and 2-year-olds were then presented to the crowd. They included the aforementioned In the Spotlight, the Indian Derby winner, as well as two fillies who each won the Indian 1000 Guineas, Free Radical (Ind) (Diffident {Fr}) and Icebreaker (Ind) (Alnasr Alwasheek {GB}).

The last order of business was a stallion show. Poonawalla has three stallions, including Arazan (Ire) (Anabaa), a half-brother to the top-class Azamour (Ire) and winner of the G2 Futurity S.; the MGSW & MG1SP Leitir Mor (Ire) (Holy Roman Emperor {Ire}); and Excellent Art (GB), winner of G1 St. James's Palace S. and second in the '07 GI Breeders' Cup Mile.

Leaving Poonawalla, I'm sure many of us in the group had a new appreciation for the Indian Thoroughbred and the Indian breeding program in general. And with America being one of the few countries that Indian owners can ship horses to, who knows? Maybe we'll be cheering on the Poonawallas soon in the States.