About the Stud and it's philosophy

Gustavii Stud is a family run small stud specialising in breeding and producing show jumping horses for the international market. We ourselves started as showjumping riders, and loved to compete, and with this came the need to find better and better horses. Sadly the best horses were not only difficult to find, but, if one were lucky enough to find them, they were not always for sale. This was the main reason for us to realise that if we wanted the absolutely best horses, we really had to try to breed them ourselves!

The continued urge to produce the best possible and to always improve our knowledge, made us 40 years ago look beyond our native Sweden.

This made us responsible for importing the stallion Any Questions in to Sweden, who although only being used on a few mares each year, for several years became leading sire in Sweden. Any Questions is probably most known as the maternal grandsire of Milton.

Our research also led us to the Dutch stallion that became our foundation stallions, namely Irco Marco. A stallion good enough to be ranked amongst the best in the world, although he has had much fewer mares, maybe 300 in his lifetime, than his rivals in Europe. A disadvantage was that the mare-material in Sweden was geared towards dressage and all-round, and not show jumping. His best offspring was therefore, not surprisingly, with imported show jumping mares. Such a mare was our foundation mare, the Irish ¾ thoroughbred grey Ballymena Park, who was mother of Mirca (7th World Cup Antwerp as well as being a brood mare), Marcoville (6th Olympic Games in Barcelona) and the beautiful stallion Irco Mena (22nd individual in World Championships in Hague, before he tragically died in an accident). Irco Mena did not have time to sire many offspring, but never the less is already champion sire of young show jumping horses in Sweden.

Another famous horse by Irco Marco and an Irish mare is Chouman (who was 5th at the World Championships in Hague with Nelson Pessoa ). His full sister, just as capable, was another one of our brood mares.

So we have concentrated to continue to breed with this great family, using only the odd brood mare, after she had competed successfully and proved to us that she was good enough for the big sport. This of course means that we have not bred that many horses, but we try to make certain that the ones we breed are good enough.

After moving the whole stud to England in late 1991, we have tried to retain a few of the best mares for stud duties. As a result we now produce approximately five young horses each year.

We find scope and ability most important, with a good technique and of course enough carefulness, but also high on the list is a superb head with good rideability (we are not all super star riders) and last but not least soundness. We are also trying to make the inheritance of this ability more dominant and stronger in horses we breed. We do this by structured breeding, using line-breeding to a certain formula. In addition we will also continually look for new interesting blood lines that will fit and blend in with what we already have. Thus you will find in the pedigree of our horses a lovely mixture of superb old Dutch blood, some French, a little German and of course some fantastic old thoroughbreds in the horses from Ireland.

We hope our future young stars will prove our philosophy! We have sold some horses young, but also produced some of our horses up to international level ourselves. We will try to continue to do this.