When the world’s most important polo championship went into overtime in 2006, the audience looked to Adolfo Cambiaso to break the tie. Then 31 years old, Cambiaso had already led the winning team at the Campeonato Argentino Abierto de Polo—known as the Palermo Open—five times before, earning himself a reputation as perhaps the best polo player in history. Three minutes after the starting bell, with the score still tied, the gifted Argentinean galloped down the field to swap mounts. Throughout the fierce game, Cambiaso had relied heavily on his favorite horse, an agile chestnut stallion with a bold white face named Aiken Cura, and he wanted to let the champion rest. As the pair made their way toward Cambiaso’s stabling area, the exhausted Aiken Cura’s front left leg suddenly gave out. When Cambiaso felt the horse begin to limp beneath him, he leapt out of his saddle and threw his blue-and-white helmet to the ground in anguish.

“Save this one whatever it takes!” he pleaded, covering his face with his gloves. But the leg had to be amputated below the knee, and eventually Cambiaso—whose team won the Palermo Open that year and would go on to win the tournament another five times—was forced to euthanize his beloved Cura.

Before he said his final good-bye, however, he had a curious request: he asked a veterinarian to make a small puncture in the stallion’s neck, put the resulting skin sample into a deep freeze, and store it in a Buenos Aires laboratory. He remembers, “I just thought maybe, someday, I could do something with the cells.”

His hope was not in vain. With the saved skin sample, Cambiaso was able to use cloning technology to bring Aiken Cura back to life. These days, a four-year-old, identical replica of Cambiaso’s star stallion—called Aiken Cura E01—cavorts around a flower-rimmed field in the Argentinean province of Córdoba, where he has begun to breed and train for competition.

Now 40 years old, Cambiaso is ruggedly handsome, with long brown hair, covetable bone structure, and permanent stubble. But in spite of his athleticism, good looks, and wealth, he is surprisingly shy. Walking across the Palermo polo field, where he’s come to watch his oldest daughter play, he speaks in short spurts, as if he would rather not be talking to a stranger. Staring into the distance, he says, “Today, seeing these clones is more normal for me. But seeing Cura alive again after so many years was really strange. It’s still strange. Thank goodness I saved his cells.”

Aiken Cura is one of a number of horses that Cambiaso has duplicated. Through their company, Crestview Genetics, Cambiaso and two wealthy polo enthusiasts—the founder, Texan Alan Meeker, and Argentinean tycoon Ernesto Gutiérrez—have created more than 25 clones of Cambiaso’s champion polo horses and around 45 clones in total. Some are already breeding, and a few others began to play in top tournaments last year. Since the company’s establishment, in 2009, the partners have cloned not only for themselves but also for other international polo players who are willing to shell out around $120,000 per horse. Crestview is one of only two commercial groups in the world replicating polo horses, and it is the more prolific.

Adolfo Cambiaso and his wife, María Vázquez, at their estancia outside Buenos Aires. Courtesy of La Dolfina Polo Lifestyle.

Cambiaso’s endorsement of cloning has helped dampen the debate that would generally accompany such an outlandish innovation. If the top player in the world is doing it, polo buffs reason, cloning must have merit. But breeders are concerned that increasing the availability of genetically promising polo ponies will push prices down across the market, threatening their businesses. Players worry they’ll need to clone to stay competitive, and they complain that the process is costly and inefficient. Other horsemen—not to mention the general public—are simply freaked out by it. Will the clones have health issues or die young? Is cloning tantamount to playing God? “People come up to me all the time and ask, ‘Why? How many? Does it work? Are they real horses?’ ” Cambiaso admits. But even the doubters concede that Crestview has started a cloning revolution. The question is no longer if cloning will transform polo but how. And, further, where will it stop?

** An $800,000 Pony**

Cloning began long before the world started paying attention to it, in 1996, when Dolly the Sheep, the first mammal successfully cloned from an adult cell, clomped into the world. One hundred years before, in 1885, Hans Driesch created two identical sea urchins by jiggling a two-celled urchin embryo until the cells separated and grew into their own creatures. Through much more sophisticated processes, scientists have since cloned pigs, cows, dogs, cats, ferrets, goats, and horses. (It is estimated that there are now around 300 cloned horses in the world, although no one has really kept track.) Now, with Crestview’s efforts, polo—the ancient “game of kings”—has found itself on the frontiers of cloning technology.