Adolfo Cambiaso, left, and Alan Meeker with some of their cloned ponies at Cambiaso’s farm, in Córdoba, Argentina, 2015. Photograph by Jonathan Becker.

The Polo-Pony Clone Wars

Cloning ponies promised perfection on the polo field. But the business has been beset by economic puzzles, ethical gray areas—and a suicide

By Mark Ellwood

I first spoke to Alan Meeker 13 years ago, when cloning polo ponies still felt like a novelty. A maverick Texas businessman with a Barnum-esque flair, he was one of the loudest voices evangelizing for the potential of creating clones—genetic duplicates—of great polo ponies.

Meeker loved polo. “The worst day on a polo field is a better day than sitting in an office,” he told me. If anyone could cajole the polo world into embracing cloning, it was him. But last summer, an exposé in Wired chronicled his attempts to sell three clones of the greatest polo pony in the world, Cuartetera, against the wishes of her owner and Meeker’s former business partner, the Argentinean polo legend Adolfo Cambiaso.