The Betrayal Behind Polo's Genetic Revolution: The Stolen Legacy of Cuartetera
Churning hooves throw up clods of dirt as mallets slice through chaos, every muscle on competing horses stretched tight, sweat sheening their coats and veins bulging under their skin. Six thousand pounds of charging flesh all lunge after one tiny white ball, riders leaning low, jabbing blindly under their mounts’ necks in a frenzy of motion. Every competitor radiates raw intensity—except Adolfo Cambiaso. Calm as still water, he raises a gloved hand, and his mallet arcs clean through the tangle of horse and man to connect with a sharp thwack, sending the ball screaming straight for the goal.
This is the 2016 Argentine Open final, the most prestigious match on the global polo calendar, held in the world’s most polo-mad nation. Thirty thousand spectators fill the stands, every eye locked on Cambiaso’s every step.
Ask any polo insider how to describe Cambiaso, and you’ll get a dozen answers: he’s an equine whisperer, a cultural sex symbol, a marvel of decades-long dominance on the field. All of them are true. At 41, he was by far the oldest athlete competing that day, his sun-cracked handsome face and cleft chin dusted with stubble, dark hair matted with sweat. But the one claim no one debates is that he is the greatest polo player alive—he held the top world ranking for more than 20 years, and many argue he is the greatest to ever pick up a mallet. What’s less talked about, even then, was that he was also a pioneering horse breeding magnate, turning the centuries-old “sport of kings” into a living laboratory for applied genetic technology right there on that final match field.
The match had been tight, brutal, a head-to-head battle between Cambiaso and Facundo Pieres—the only active player who comes close to challenging his spot at the top of the rankings. As the clock ticked down to the final minutes, Cambiaso faced a make-or-break choice. Polo fields stretch 300 yards long; even the best polo ponies burn out after just a few minutes of full-tilt galloping at 30 miles an hour. Elite players bring a dozen or more horses to a single match, swapping mounts as often as ten times per game. Cambiaso had to pick which steed would carry him through the final push.
Waiting in the line of ponies were six lean bay mares, each marked with a splash of white across their dark foreheads. Over his decades-long career, Cambiaso has ridden thousands of horses, but these six are unlike any others. They are exact genetic duplicates—clones produced by a biotech firm called Crestview Genetics—of the most famous polo pony in history: Cuartetera, a champion mare recently retired after an unbeatable career. The pair of Cambiaso and Cuartetera were nearly unstoppable together.
“She was the best horse to ever play polo,” says Scott Swerdlin, an equine veterinarian who cared for Cambiaso’s string of ponies early in his career.
Cuartetera had it all: blistering acceleration, top speed, cat-like agility, and a preternaturally calm, sharp mind. As Argentines say of a once-in-a-generation equine, she was una maquina—a machine.
For the final moments of the final, Cambiaso chooses Cuartetera B06, the sixth clone of the original mare he helped produce. Two minutes later, the sixth Cuartetera is flying down the field, Cambiaso and his teammates charging toward the north goal. The ball bounces free to a Cambiaso teammate, who guides it between the posts, and the crowd erupts, waving blue and white Argentine flags. Seconds later, the match is over. Cambiaso—and Cuartetera B06—are champions.
Player and horse are immediately swallowed by a crush of celebrating well-wishers. In the crowd is Cambiaso’s 11-year-old son Adolfo Jr.—known to everyone as Poroto—already a rising polo prodigy. Also there is Alan Meeker, Cambiaso’s business partner and founder of Crestview Genetics. Lean, with thinning gray hair and intense dark eyes, Meeker pulls the champion into a hug.
Far beyond the insular world of elite polo, that match went down in history. It was the first time any player had competed in a polo final on six identical horses, let alone won the match on them. The victory not only cemented Cambiaso’s status as polo’s most dominant force, but also proved that cloning had a permanent place in the sport. For years, polo purists had treated cloning with deep suspicion, convinced cloned horses would be nothing more than unhealthy knockoffs of great originals. But that day, a team of clones defeated one of the most respected traditional horse breeding operations in the sport. Speaking to Science magazine after the win, Meeker—a Texas oil, gas, and real estate millionaire who convinced Cambiaso to join his cloning venture—called the victory “proof of concept.”
What concept, exactly? For Cambiaso, the idea was simple: in a sport where the horse matters more than the rider, anyone who can replicate the best horse in the world indefinitely holds an unbeatable advantage. If Cambiaso could control his herd of cloned Cuarteteras, and if young Poroto continued to live up to his prodigy billing, the result would be a multi-generational polo dynasty unlike any other. His plan was to lock down Cuartetera’s unbeatable bloodline through cloning, capitalize on decades of breeding excellence, and dominate the sport for generations.
There was only one crack in the plan: Cambiaso did not own the rights to Cuartetera’s DNA alone. And just four years after that 2016 historic win, a secret deal struck on a superyacht would upend every part of his carefully built legacy. This story, drawn from hundreds of pages of court filings, trial testimony, and depositions, tells the story of that betrayal.
Oddly enough, it was Imelda Marcos who first put the idea of cloning into Alan Meeker’s head. It was the early 2000s, at the height of the fracking boom, and Meeker—a third-generation oil and gas man—was buying up natural gas drilling rights across Texas’ Barnett Shale, a massive reserve spanning more than a dozen counties in North Texas.
One parcel Meeker wanted to buy traced back to Marcos and her late husband, the notoriously corrupt former president of the Philippines. To work out the sale, Meeker had a series of phone calls with the famously talkative former first lady. During one conversation, Meeker mentioned he had recently been diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, a condition where the immune system destroys the insulin-producing cells in the pancreas. According to Meeker’s account, Marcos replied that when her lawyer was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, her doctors had tried to clone him a new pancreas. Maybe Meeker should try the same thing?
Meeker never did clone a new pancreas. But the conversation stuck with him. Meeker had played amateur polo in his 30s, and he knew how inefficient, expensive, and unpredictable traditional horse breeding was for the sport. In late 2008, he reached out to a handful of equine geneticists, asking if cloning polo horses was possible. They told him it was technically possible, though there was no guarantee cloned horses would perform as well as the original on the polo field. Intrigued, Meeker set out to find the best polo horse and the best polo player to launch his experiment.
In the summer of 2009, Meeker and Cambiaso met for the first time on a farm west of London. Meeker laid out his plan for horse cloning, and Cambiaso was immediately receptive. Years earlier, one of his favorite stallions, Aiken Cura, had been unexpectedly euthanized after an injury—and Cambiaso had asked his vets to preserve a sample of the stallion’s skin tissue in cryogenic storage, waiting for the day cloning would be possible.
The two men hammered out a verbal agreement that day in England. Cambiaso would provide tissue samples from five of his best horses: Colibri, Small Person, Dolfina Lapa, Aiken Cura, and Cuartetera. The original plan was simple: Meeker’s company would license the cloning technology to produce the clones, and the pair would sell the cloned horses for a minimum of $250,000 apiece. To seal the deal, Meeker’s company paid Cambiaso a $1 million upfront bonus, which the polo player deposited in a Swiss bank account named after Aiken Cura.
With that, Meeker contracted ViaGen, the world’s leading pet and equine cloning clinic, to extract Cuartetera’s DNA, insert it into hollowed-out egg cells, and implant the embryos into surrogate mares. The surrogates gave birth to 10 healthy clones of Cuartetera, plus at least 17 clones of Cambiaso’s other top horses. Cambiaso could hardly believe it: his most prized bloodlines had been brought back, young and healthy, all over again.
Meeker and Cambiaso suspected polo’s elite would jump at the chance to own a piece of the world’s best polo horse’s DNA, but they had no idea if the market would actually bear their $250,000 price tag. Even the best traditionally bred polo ponies rarely sold for more than $200,000 back then, and cloning was completely unheard of in the sport. So in November 2010, Cambiaso hosted his first solo auction in San Isidro, an affluent suburb just north of Buenos Aires, to test the market.
The auction became the social event of the Argentine polo season, with top players and wealthy sponsors mingling over drinks as they evaluated the ponies up for sale. The results exceeded every expectation Cambiaso had. Even before the first clone went up for bid, a 50% share in a naturally bred son of the original Cuartetera sold for $380,000. Next up was a six-month-old clone of Cuartetera. A hush of excitement fell over the crowd as the foal was led into the dramatically lit auction ring.
Just minutes before bidding was set to open, Ernesto Gutierrez, a long-time friend of Cambiaso and Argentine airport tycoon, pulled the polo star aside and warned him he was about to make a catastrophic mistake. “You can’t sell Cuartetera,” he pleaded. “If you sell this clone, you lose your most valuable bloodline forever.”
Cambiaso immediately saw his point. If a half share in Cuartetera’s son was worth $380,000, the full value of a clone was $760,000—and selling the clone meant anyone could replicate the bloodline indefinitely. Cuartetera’s DNA was a trade secret; give it away, and anyone could breed and sell their own Cuartetera offspring.
With the auction clock ticking down, Cambiaso worked out a new plan: Gutierrez would split the cost with him, and they would keep the clone. The bidding war that followed pushed the final price to a reported $800,000, a new record for any polo pony.
That San Isidro auction changed everything for Meeker, Cambiaso, and Gutierrez, who soon joined the partnership as a third co-owner. Out of the auction came one golden rule the trio would live by for the next decade: you can sell any naturally bred foal sired by clones, but the clones themselves are never for sale.
“If you sell a clone, you sell everything,” Cambiaso explained in a 2018 60 Minutes interview.
Traditional horse breeding is always a genetic lottery. Even if you breed your best mare to your best stallion, there is no way to predict how their genes will combine. The foal could turn out to be a dud, and you’ll have spent years and tens of thousands of dollars to find out. You have to stable, feed, and care for the foal for two years before you even ride it for the first time. Then you spend years training it to respond to your cues, turn on a dime, go from 30 miles an hour to a full stop without injury, all while paying for vets, grooms, farriers, feed, transport, and equipment. By the time the pony is 5 years old and ready for its first match, you’ve invested a small fortune—and it could still spook at the first contact with another horse and be useless for high-goal polo.
In Argentina, polo is second only to soccer as a national obsession. Top players are household names, and the best international competitors are known as “hired assassins” for their ruthless skill. Nearly every top-ranked player and every top polo pony in the world comes from Argentina.
That’s why polo relies on a system of wealthy patrons: teams are funded by rich amateur players, who hire the best Argentine professionals, cover all the costs of horses, equipment, travel, and entry fees, and get to play on the team alongside the pros. A handicap system keeps the game balanced: players are ranked from -2 (complete beginner) to 10 (the highest possible skill, held by fewer than a dozen players in the world). Most patrons are ranked around 0, and the total handicap of a four-person team can’t exceed a set limit, ensuring a mix of amateurs, rising stars, and elite pros.
In the mid-2010s, as Cambiaso began testing his first clones in competition, a new patron burst onto the international polo scene: Andrey Borodin, former president of the Bank of Moscow, who fled Russia in 2011 and received political asylum in the UK. He bought Park Place, an 18th-century palatial estate that once belonged to King George III’s father, for a reported £140 million ($187 million)—the most expensive home ever sold in the UK at the time.
He named his new polo team Park Place, and set about buying up some of the best players and ponies in the world. Borodin, an aristocratically pale amateur with a 0 handicap, used his fortune to quickly turn Park Place into a formidable contender. The team won the 2017 Royal Windsor Cup in front of Queen Elizabeth II, then moved into high-goal competition in the US. Borodin had enough money to buy any horse on the open market—but he still didn’t have the edge Cambiaso held: access to Cuartetera’s bloodline, which wasn’t for sale.
For nearly 10 years, Meeker, Gutierrez, and Cambiaso stuck to their golden rule: sell the foals, keep the clones. As the clones matured, Cambiaso’s herd of Cuarteteras dominated high-goal polo. Not every cloned horse turns out to be as good as the original, veterinarians say—for reasons no one fully understands, some great horses produce clones that never match the original’s skill. Cuartetera was a happy exception: every one of her clones turned out to be a top-tier competitor.
“Some horses just have that innate ability to pass along the qualities that make a great polo pony, and Cuartetera is one of them,” says Swerdlin. “She’s been incredibly successful, no question.”
Meanwhile, Cambiaso’s son Poroto was growing into a polo star in his own right. By 15, he already had a handicap of 8, and looked set to reach the 10 handicap his father held. Cambiaso dreamed that one day, his son would ride Cuarteteras just like he had, and the bloodline would stay in the family forever.
As Cambiaso racked up win after win, the three partners grew closer. It was Meeker’s idea to start cloning, and Gutierrez’s business acumen that kept the operation running. When Cuartetera B09 won a high-profile match, Meeker texted Cambiaso over WhatsApp: “It’s the best news ever! I raised her. WE did it. You, Ernesto and me. We are the dream team.”
Every spring during the US polo season, Meeker and his son would visit the Cambiaso family in Florida. Meeker’s son was the same age as Poroto, and the two boys played polo together, often joining their fathers for practice matches. “If he ever runs away from home I will have to call you and Maria [Cambiaso’s wife], because that’s where he would go!” Meeker texted Cambiaso in 2018. Cambiaso promised he would help Meeker’s son with anything he needed in polo, and Meeker talked about his dream that one day his son Aiden would sponsor Poroto’s team, and the two young men would compete together on cloned Cuarteteras.
The men trusted each other completely. Loyalties shift fast in polo, and with clones drawing so much attention, there was always a risk a jealous rival would try to drive a wedge between them. But after a decade working together, they were sure they could count on each other. “I appreciate your friendship more than anything,” Meeker texted Cambiaso in August 2018. Cambiaso wrote back: “Me to thank you Alan. i feel safe with you.”
He should not have.
In October 2020, Alan Meeker stepped onto the deck of the Amaryllis, a 257-foot superyacht docked in the Bahamas. The yacht has six staterooms, a gym, spa, sundeck, and room for 12 guests and 23 crew, cutting an imposing figure against the Caribbean blue. Meeker was there to close a secret deal.
Waiting for him on board was Andrey Borodin. By that point, Borodin’s Park Place Polo was already one of the top teams in the world, and had narrowly lost the Queen’s Cup final after beating Cambiaso’s team to qualify. But Borodin wanted more, and Meeker had agreed to sell him three Cuartetera clones for $2.4 million.
This deal directly violated the golden rule the three partners had agreed to back in 2010 after the San Isidro auction, and Borodin’s team knew it. They were wary. Everyone knew how much Cuartetera meant to Cambiaso—if he found out his most prized bloodline had been sold without his permission, he would be furious.
Borodin’s team pressed Meeker to prove he had the legal right to sell the clones. Meeker insisted he had full rights to clone and sell Cuartetera, but when it came time to put that guarantee in writing, he repeatedly removed those promises from draft contracts. That made Borodin’s team nervous. The two sides negotiated for weeks, trading confidentiality agreements, contract revisions, and legal protections in case the deal fell apart.
