Depending on who you ask, Cambiaso might be described as a horse whisperer, a sex symbol, or a marvel of longevity. And it’s all true: At 41 he’s easily the oldest player on this field, his handsome face and cleft chin sun-beaten and stubbled, his dark hair matted with sweat. But the more universally accepted fact is that Cambiaso is the greatest polo player alive—top ranked for some two decades—if not the greatest who has ever lived. As if that weren’t enough, he’s also a horse breeding tycoon who is, on this very field, in this very game, transforming polo from the sport of kings into a frontier laboratory of applied biotechnology. It has been a mean, close match, a battle between Cambiaso and Facundo Pieres, the only player alive who might challenge his standing atop the sport’s rankings. As the game hits its final stages, Cambiaso has a crucial decision to make. Polo fields are 300 yards long. Even the finest polo ponies tire out after a few minutes of charging at 30 miles per hour, so elite players bring 10 or more horses to each match, switching steeds as many as a dozen times. Cambiaso must choose which horse to ride in the game’s final stretch. Among his ponies are six lean bay mares with splashes of white staining their dark foreheads. Cambiaso has ridden thousands of horses in his decades-long career, but these mares are special. They are perfect genetic copies—clones made by a company called Crestview Genetics—of the most celebrated pony ever to set hoof on a polo field: a prize-winning, recently retired mare called Cuartetera. As a pair, Cambiaso and Cuartetera were almost unbeatable. “Best horse ever to play polo,” says equine veterinarian Scott Swerdlin, who helped take care of Cambiaso’s ponies earlier in his career. She had everything: acceleration, speed, agility, a calm, razor-sharp mind. The horse was, as Argentinians like to say, una maquina. For those last moments of the final, Cambiaso selects Cuartetera B06—the sixth clone he helped create. Two minutes later this sixth Cuartetera is away, tearing up the field as Cambiaso and his teammates race toward the north end. The ball sprays forward and finds Cambiaso’s teammate, who guides it through the posts as the crowd cheer and wave Argentine flags. In moments it’s all over. Cambiaso—and Cuartetera B06—have won. Player and horse are quickly enveloped in a crush of well-wishers. Among those cheering is Cambiaso’s son, Adolfo Jr., who goes by the nickname Poroto; at 11 he’s already a polo-playing prodigy. Also in the throng is Cambiaso’s business partner, Crestview’s founder, Alan Meeker. A lean man with thinning gray hair and dark, serious eyes, Meeker wraps the champion in a hug. Well beyond the rarefied world of polo, the match is hailed as historic. This is the first time anyone has played a polo final on six identical horses, let alone won with them. The victory not only reinforces Cambiaso’s reputation as polo’s most dominant player, but cements cloning’s place in the sport. Polo aficionados have long treated cloning with skepticism, fearing that cloned offspring would be little more than sickly knockoffs of once great horses. But now a team of clones has resolutely thrashed one of the best horse-breeding outfits in existence. Speaking to Science magazine after the match, Meeker—a Texan who made his fortune in oil, gas, and real estate before convincing Cambiaso to join his cloning venture—calls the victory a “proof of concept.” Which concept, exactly? For Cambiaso, it seems to be this: In a sport where horses are more important than their riders, anyone who can indefinitely clone the best steed in the world has the ultimate edge. If Cambiaso can strategically manage his herd of cloned Cuarteteras, and if young Poroto keeps showing promise as a player, this could be the start of a multispecies polo dynasty. His formula is to capitalize on years of horse-breeding superiority through cloning, lock down the bloodlines, and dominate the sport. The only flaw is that Cambiaso isn’t the only one with control of those bloodlines. And one day nearly four years after that 2016 match, a secret deal made on a superyacht will throw the entire formula into disarray. This story—drawing on hundreds of court documents, trial testimonies, and depositions—is the chronicle of that betrayal. One natural gas field that Meeker hoped to purchase seemed to be connected to Marcos and her deceased husband, the notoriously corrupt former president of the Philippines. To probe the sale, Meeker held a series of phone calls with the very chatty Marcos. During one conversation, Meeker told the former dictator’s wife that he’d recently been diagnosed with type 1 diabetes—a condition in which the body’s immune system attacks insulin-producing cells in the pancreas. In Meeker’s telling, Marcos then mentioned that when her lawyer had come down with pancreatic cancer, her doctors had tried to clone him a new pancreas. Perhaps Meeker should try the same approach? Meeker never did clone his pancreas. But the conversation gave him an idea. Meeker had played amateur polo in his thirties, and he knew how important—and how expensive and inefficient—traditional horse breeding was to the sport. In late 2008 he started talking to a couple of scientists, asking whether it was possible to clone horses. Yes, they told him, though there was no guarantee that the clones would perform as well as the originals on the polo field. Intrigued, Meeker began his search for the perfect horse—and polo player—to start his cloning experiment. In the summer of 2009, Cambiaso and the oilman met for the first time. On a farm west of London, Cambiaso listened as Meeker shared his plans for horse cloning. As it happened, Cambiaso was especially primed for the pitch: Years ago, when one of his favorite horses, a stallion named Aiken Cura, had to be put down suddenly, Cambiaso had asked his veterinarians to save a genetic sample from the horse’s skin in cryogenic storage. He’d been waiting for an opportunity to clone the stallion. In England, the two men hashed out a verbal agreement. Cambiaso would give Meeker’s company tissue from five of his best horses: Colibri, Small Person, Dolfina Lapa, Aiken Cura, and Cuartetera. The initial plan was for Meeker’s company to license the technology to clone the horses, and for the men to sell the clones for a minimum of $250,000 each. To sweeten the deal, Meeker’s company paid Cambiaso a million dollars, which the polo player placed in a Swiss bank account named after Aiken Cura. With that, Meeker contracted the world’s leading pet cloning clinic, ViaGen, to transfer the DNA from Cuartetera into egg cells and then implant the embryos into donor mares. Those surrogates duly gave birth to 10 clones of the legendary horse, and at least 17 copies of other horses owned by Cambiaso. The polo player couldn’t believe it—his most prized bloodlines had been made young again. Meeker and Cambiaso likely suspected that polo’s elites would clamor to get their hands on the DNA of their sport’s most legendary horse, but the two business partners had no real idea whether their clones would command the $250,000 price they’d targeted. After all, even the best ponies rarely reached above $200,000, and cloning was virtually unknown in polo at the time. So in November 2010, Cambiaso held his first-ever solo auction in San Isidro, an affluent city just north of Buenos Aires, to test the market’s appetite. The auction was a major social event in the Argentine polo scene—players and patrons mingled, drinks in hand, as they weighed up which ponies they might like to add to their stables. It blew past Cambiaso’s expectations almost immediately. At the top of the auction, even before any clones went up for bidding, a 50 percent share in a son of the original Cuartetera went for $380,000. Soon up for bidding was a six-month-old clone of Cuartetera. A palpable buzz of anticipation went through the crowd as the players and patrons sat facing the dramatically lit ring where the foal would be displayed. With only a few minutes to go before bidding started, a longtime friend of Cambiaso’s, Argentine airport tycoon Ernesto Gutierrez, says he sidled up to the polo player and told him he was about to make a terrible mistake. “You can’t sell Cuartetera,” he pleaded. “You can’t sell it, because you will be losing your most important bloodline you have in your breed.” Cambiaso could see Gutierrez’s point. If the son of Cuartetera was fully worth $760,000 at auction, it seemed foolish to sell the bloodline altogether. The horse’s DNA was like a trade secret—sell it away and anyone could breed and market their own Cuartetera offspring. As the seconds ticked down, Cambiaso suggested an alternative. Gutierrez could split the cost with a mutual friend, and they could buy the clone themselves. The decision allowed them to control what turned out to be a dizzyingly valuable asset. After intense bidding, the clone reportedly went for $800,000, said to be a record for a polo pony. The San Isidro auction changed how Cambiaso, Meeker, and Gutierrez—who, following another agreement, would soon become their business partner—thought about their cloning scheme. The new arrangement, as Cambiaso essentially understood it, had one golden rule: Sell all the babies of clones that you like, but the clones themselves must never be sold. “You sell everything if you sell a clone,” Cambiaso would tell 60 Minutes in a 2018 segment. The media was growing increasingly fascinated with polo’s turn toward science fiction. In a 2018 episode of National Geographic Explorer, Meeker sat inside a huge and immaculately designed horse barn, talking about cloning and the inherent riskiness and camaraderie of polo. “A lot of what makes life worth living is dangerous,” he said. “We all are very good friends from around the world.” “And then also,” he added with a wry smirk, “we like to win.” Traditional horse breeding is a lottery: Throw together even your best mare and stallion and there’s no way of knowing how their genetics will combine. Their filly could be a dud, and you’d still have to wait several years to know for sure. You take care of the horse, stable it, feed it for two years before you even try to ride it. Then you teach it to change leads, listen to your legs, turn on a dime, and go from 30 mph to zero without injuring itself. All along you pay for vets, grooms, farriers, breakers, feed, transport, and tack. You’re talking tens of thousands of dollars each year. Finally around age 5, the pony is ready for its first polo match. So you take the horse to the field and … it spooks as soon as it takes its first bump from another pony. Now you have an unenviable choice. Do you sink another 10 grand into training, or sell the mare at a steep discount? Then there are the players: In Argentina, polo is arguably second only to soccer as the sport of national obsession. The top polo players are household names; those who venture into the international polo circuit are known as “hired assassins.” Nearly every top-ranked polo player is from Argentina, and so are the sport’s best horses. All of this is why polo depends on a system of patronage. Teams are bankrolled by wealthy sponsors, who hire the best Argentine assassins while keeping them supplied with Argentine ponies, bridles, bandages, reins, saddles, trailers, trucks, helmets, mallets, kneeguards, and the thousand other expenses a polo team might incur. In return, the patron, a polo amateur, gets to play on the team. Finally, a handicap system keeps this delicate dance of money and skill in motion. Polo players are assigned a rating that corresponds to their skill. The highest is 10—Cambiaso is one of fewer than a dozen such players in the world—and the lowest is a complete novice at –2. Most patrons hover around a handicap of 0. The summed handicaps of all four players on a team cannot exceed a certain number, essentially guaranteeing a mix of amateurs, up-and-comers, and seasoned professional players. In the mid-2010s, just as Cambiaso was trying out his first clones on the polo field, a new patron emerged on the US polo scene. A former president of the Bank of Moscow, Andrey Borodin fled his native Russia in 2011, finding political asylum in the UK, where he bought Park Place—a palatial 18th-century estate that once belonged to the father of King George III. The reported £140 million ($187 million) that Borodin paid for Park Place made it the most expensive home ever sold in the UK at the time. Park Place also lent its name to Borodin’s new polo team, which the Russian exile started to fill with some of the world’s best players and ponies. Aristocratically pale and with the hint of a paunch filling out his royal blue and yellow jersey, Borodin himself played with a handicap of 0. Thanks largely to his skills off the polo field, the Russian billionaire patron and his team began to shake up the English polo scene, winning the 2017 Royal Windsor Cup—as Queen Elizabeth II watched from the stands—before turning to high-goal matches in the US. From almost nothing, Borodin was building Park Place into a formidable new force in elite polo, largely with the sheer power of his fortune. Borodin had the money to buy the best horses on the planet. But he still lacked an edge that Cambiaso had—one that wasn’t for sale. Cambiaso’s son, Poroto, was also becoming a polo star. At 15 he already had a handicap of 8 and seemed destined to follow his father all the way to 10. One day, the father hoped, Poroto would ride Cuarte-tera just like he had—with their new cloning agreement, he thought, his horse’s bloodlines could never be separated from his family. As Cambiaso racked up his victories, the oilman, polo star, and Argentine tycoon grew closer. Both Meeker and Gutierrez could claim some responsibility for Cambiaso’s string of successes. It was Meeker’s idea to start cloning the horses, after all, and Gutierrez who had provided the business model. When the Cuartetera B09 performed well at a high-profile polo match, Meeker was ecstatic. “It’s the best news ever! I raised her,” he told Cambiaso over WhatsApp. “WE did it. You, Ernesto and me. We are the dream team.” As the US polo season rolled around in the spring, Meeker and his son would often visit the Cambiasos in Florida. His son was similar in age to Poroto, and the two boys would play polo together, sometimes roping in their fathers for practice games. “If he ever runs away from home I will have to call you and [Cambiaso’s wife] Maria, because that’s where he would go!” Meeker messaged Cambiaso in 2018. The polo player promised that he’d help Meeker’s son with anything he needed in polo. Meeker told Cambiaso he dreamed of a day when his son, Aiden, would sponsor Poroto Cambiaso’s team and the two boys would ride on cloned horses together. More than anything, the men trusted one another. Loyalties shift quickly in polo, and with the clones garnering so much attention there was always the possibility that a jealous rival would try to come between them. Still, the oilman and the polo star had been through enough to know they could rely on one another. “I appreciate your friendship more than anything,” Meeker messaged in August 2018. His friend agreed. “Me to [sic] thank you Alan. i feel safe with you.” He shouldn’t have. On the yacht was Andrey Borodin. His team, Park Place Polo, was now ranked alongside the best teams in the world; it had recently defeated Cambiaso’s team to qualify for the semifinals of the Queen’s Cup, only to narrowly lose in the final. But Borodin seemed to want more, and Meeker was in the process of agreeing to sell the Russian exile three Cuartetera clones for $2.4 million. This was exactly the kind of deal that the three business partners—Meeker, Gutierrez, and Cambiaso—had decided against after the San Isidro auction back in 2010, and Borodin’s associates suspected as much. They were wary about the deal. Everyone knew Cuartetera was one of the most famous horses in polo. Surely Cambiaso would be livid if he found out his most prized bloodline was being sold without his knowledge? The patron’s associates were curious to figure out whether Meeker really did have the right to sell the cloned horses. Meeker had assured Borodin’s colleagues that he had license to clone Cuartetera, but when it came to pinning this down in a contract, the oilman would remove these guarantees from drafts of the agreement. To Borodin’s employees, that seemed strange. The two sides traded confidentiality agreements, contracts, assurance, and legal fallbacks in case the deal went sour. Borodin’s side insisted that $250,000 of the sale price be held in escrow in case Cambiaso sued in an attempt to recover the cloned horses. Meeker’s patience seemed to be growing thin. He was eager to get the deal signed but was being bogged down by lawyers. The Texan figured he had nothing to fear—he doubted his polo-playing friend would have the guts to sue, even if he did find out about the deal. “I fear we are drowning in a fever swamp of overanalyzation, paralyzation regarding what-ifs and legal theories that could be cooked up by an Argentinean that does not have the wherewithal, nor the fortitude to create massive litigation,” he wrote in an email to one of Borodin’s lawyers. Borodin’s associates held their noses, and the Texan got his deal. In addition to the three cloned horses, Meeker’s company would assist Park Place in setting up its own horse cloning laboratory. Not only was he selling access to the Cuartetera bloodlines, Meeker was giving Park Place the ability to replicate them indefinitely. If Meeker’s deal went to plan, then Park Place would no longer just be the team that bought the best ponies out there—it would be a cloning operation to rival Cambiaso’s, with access to the same precious bloodlines the Argentinian had based his legacy upon. On November 17, 2020, a trailer set off from Crestview’s ranch in Aiken, South Carolina. It was bound for the village of Wellington, Florida, to a property hidden by a gate flanked with the Park Place crest. Inside the trailer were three bay fillies with stripes of white down their long faces. On the shipping documents the three ponies were identified by numbers—B10, B11, and B12—but the animals shared a name, just like they shared everything else. They were all Cuarteteras. His friendship with Meeker had cooled during the pandemic year. Unbeknownst to Cambiaso, the oilman had been shopping his clones around to potential buyers in the United Arab Emirates and China as well as to Borodin. In Instagram messages and a phone call, Meeker even teased selling clones to Bartolome Castagnola, a top-ranked polo rival who was married to Cambiaso’s sister. Meeker hinted that there might be more Cuarteteras for sale, Castagnola later said in an affidavit. It wasn’t long before the rumors were flying in the notoriously gossipy polo scene. Meeker thought about coming clean before he was found out. But if Cambiaso was going to get wind of the deal anyway, Meeker mused, he could be stragetic with the timing of his revelation. Why not tell the polo player about the sale of the three clones the night before his biggest game of the year—the Argentine Open final? In the end, it was about a month before the final when Cambiaso found out his bloodlines had leaked. The news left the Argentinian dismayed. As he would later testify, that bloodline wasn’t meant just for him. It was supposed to secure the future of Poroto, and also his daughter Mia, who was a rising polo star in her own right. Suddenly his whole family seemed in jeopardy. As soon as a single clone was out of his hands, the Cuarte-tera bloodline was lost to him forever. If Cuartetera’s DNA had escaped his grasp then he could see there was nothing to stop Borodin—or anyone else for that matter—from cloning the prized pony over and over again. The top polo tournaments could be flooded with Cuarte-teras. In December, he sued Meeker to try to get his horses back. Shortly thereafter, on orders from the court, Borodin’s three clones were shipped back to Meeker’s farm in South Carolina until the litigation was resolved. Polo is a small world, and the world of horse cloning smaller still. There was barely a figure involved in either field that didn’t touch the case in some shape or form. Cambiaso and Meeker both took the stand, as did their former business partner Ernesto Gutierrez and the veterinarian Scott Swerdlin. Borodin didn’t appear—Park Place Polo Team Corporation had been named as a defendant at one point, then removed from the suit—but one of his associates was sent to observe the case and was later called as a witness for the plaintiffs. In the trial, Meeker and his companies faced nearly a dozen different claims. Cambiaso’s lawyers alleged that the oilman had breached multiple agreements and misappropriated a trade secret when he sold the Cuartetera clones to Park Place. The lawyers demanded that Meeker return any cloned horses and tissue that were still in his possession and stop using Cuartetera’s DNA in any way. Meeker, who was accompanied at the witness stand by his diabetes alert dog Pico, in turn accused Cambiaso of breaking multiple agreements the two men and their companies had made. Plus, Meeker claimed, an early agreement with Cambiaso gave him license to sell the clones. As the trial got underway, Poroto watched his father from the gallery. As one of Cambiaso’s lawyers, Francis McDonald, stood to make his opening statement, he gestured toward his client’s son. At 17, Poroto had become the youngest polo player to reach the maximum handicap of 10; it looked like the young star was on track to eclipse his father’s legendary achievements on the field. Just three days earlier, Poroto had beaten his father in the final of the US Open. This case was about that legacy. But in the eyes of the plaintiffs, it also boiled down to something much easier to understand: betrayal. “I submit to you, ladies and gentleman, there is no country or society or business or LLC in the world where what Mr. Meeker did behind Adolfo’s back would be considered right. There just isn’t,” McDonald told the jury during his closing argument eight long and torturous days later. McDonald worked up to his final flourish. What drove Meeker to turn his back on his former friend, a man he had once implied could be another father to his son? Shortly before he started negotiating the deal to sell the clones, Meeker had lost another legal battle over an unpaid contract involving a genomics testing company he had cofounded, and was served with a judgment to pay $1.4 million. “Alan Meeker needed money. Alan Meeker needed to do something to get rid of some things. And what did he do? He turned it all against his former business associate and best friend and he sold clones behind his back.” I go to meet the veterinarian Scott Swerdlin at the Palm Beach Equine Clinic, which has the feel of a high-end health club. Swerdlin tells me that Cambiaso’s breeding operation produces several thousand horse embryos a year. “It’s a tremendous investment in the industry and in horse flesh. Plus, he clones a lot of horses. It’s really about organization.” Organization, and bloodlines. One of Swerdlin’s colleagues leads me to a cramped room filled with tanks of liquid nitrogen. It’s little more than a storage cupboard, but here is where they store semen from stud horses used to inseminate mares. A stud contract might go for $5,000, making the room worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Inside one of the canisters tucked into the corner of a room is a sample of DNA from Cuartetera herself. Head out of Palm Beach Equine Clinic, a short drive west past the dank canals flanking the roads and down a long palm-fringed driveway, and you’ll end up at the National Polo Centre—the gaudy-glamorous home of polo in the US. It is here, a few days after my visit to the clinic, that the two Cambiasos—father and son—ride out to face each other in the US Open final once more. By a little past the halfway point, it is clear that this won’t be the moment when Poroto eclipses his father once and for all: The 50-year-old Adolfo’s team is running away with the match. As the players line up for a throw-in, the younger Cambiaso races back to jump onto a new mare, her white coat shining in the afternoon sun. The horse tosses her head to the side as Poroto pulls her round to his right, toward the south end of the field. He races toward the goal posts with his father close behind, mallet raised in the air. Cut off by his charging father, Poroto desperately tries for a narrow shot toward the goal, but the ball bobbles off the pitch toward a hedgerow. A few minutes later it’s all over. Adolfo has won decisively. At the final bell the son rides up to his father and the two men clasp hands briefly, then embrace. After that Adolfo is swallowed by a crowd of people wearing his team’s colors, grinning, the air muggy with the scent of horse sweat and champagne as people clamor to snatch a moment with the polo legend before he recedes from view. In any event, the two Cambiasos will still have their horses. In Florida, the jury and the judge sided with the polo star, ordering that Meeker return to Cambiaso all the clones he had in his possession. In a post-trial deposition, Meeker was asked if he knew whether Borodin had “extracted any tissue” from the Cuartetera clones he’d bought. Meeker said he didn’t know. In March 2025 the two sides announced to the court that they had reached a preliminary settlement agreement. Around the same time, an LLC managed by Meeker sold Crestview’s farm in Aiken for $6.8 million. None of the parties involved in the court case responded to WIRED’s requests for comment. The original Cuartetera died on May 4, 2023, right in the middle of the legal battle over her DNA. Cambiaso was distraught, calling her the best mare he had ever ridden. “It is a very sad moment indeed, very painful for me, poor thing,” he told a polo magazine at the time. Cuartetera’s bloodline, of course, lives on in the dozens of clones and foals she produced. And perhaps in one other way, too. In 2017 it was rumored that the Argentine Association of Polo Horse Breeders had plans to make a bronze statue of the peerless mare, to be placed outside the Campo Argentino de Polo, the same venue where Adolfo Cambiaso had changed polo forever by riding his six clones to victory. The statue would be the only life-size replica of the most famous polo pony of all time. That was the idea, at least. In April 2017 a Texas oilman got wind of the plan to cast Cuartetera in bronze. At a moment when everyone was still on good terms, Alan Meeker fired off a message to one of Adolfo Cambiaso’s close associates. He had a spot on his farm that would be perfect for a statue of the horse. Could he make a copy? Let us know what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor at mail@wired.com.