Cloning Came to Polo. Then Things Got Truly Uncivilized

To play polo at the highest level, you have to love horses or be filthy rich. Ideally both. A team might field around 40 ponies for each game and draw on a roster of hundreds of potentially playable horses for each tournament. In the gaps between tournaments, top players scour the globe for new equine talent—trying to snaffle foals from elite bloodlines or looking to ex-racehorses to uncover a polo star in the rough.

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.