Field of clones: How horse replicas came to dominate polo | Knowable Magazine

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CREDIT: KHEIRON BIOTECH

Eight clones of Virolita, one of the most valuable polo mares of her generation, produced by the Argentine laboratory Kheiron Biotech in 2016. This was one of the first successful cases of multiple cloning of a high-performance horse.

Technology<br>Field of clones: How horse replicas came to dominate polo<br>In Argentina, equine cloning in polo is no longer a rarity. It’s now a mature industry — although ethical dilemmas surrounding it persist.<br>By Maximiliano Fernández 01.21.2026<br>Facebook<br>Bluesky<br>Twitter<br>LinkedIn<br>WhatsApp<br>Reddit<br>Flipboard<br>Email<br>Print<br>Republish

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Lea en español<br>At the slightest touch of the reins, he felt a familiarity that shook him. It was 2016, and polo player Adolfo Cambiaso — considered the best in the world — was riding for the first time on a genetic clone of Cuartetera, his flagship mare. The same explosive start, the same agility in the curves, the same sustained stride in the long sprints. “It was the same,” he recalls. “Same movements, same head.... I couldn’t believe it.” It took only a few seconds for him to realize that his gamble — which many had dismissed as nonsense — had paid off.<br>Cambiaso, now 50, had seen before anyone else, back in 2006, the opportunity to preserve the genetics of his most exceptional horses through cloning and thus perpetuate his La Dolfina team, from the province of Buenos Aires, at the top of polo for generations.<br>That year, in the middle of the Palermo Open final — the ultimate temple of polo — his horse Aiken Cura suffered a devastating fracture and had to be put down. But before saying goodbye, Cambiaso made an unusual request to the veterinarians. “Just in case, before they put him to sleep, I said, ‘Let’s save some cells.’” It was nothing more than a hunch. He had heard the story of Dolly the sheep, the first mammal cloned from an adult cell, and the idea stuck in his mind.<br>YOU MAY ALSO LIKE

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That intuition two decades ago led to a radical change in the world of polo. La Dolfina, now with more than 150 cloned horses, has established unprecedented dominance, and Argentina has become the world center for horse cloning, far ahead of the United States and Europe. Over the years, laboratories have refined the procedure and improved the success rate — although it remains low.<br>Hence the high costs: Cloning a horse involves far more investment than that required to breed a good specimen the traditional way. And although equine cloning is no longer a rarity but a mature industry, the ethical dilemmas surrounding it — animal welfare, fair competition and the extent to which biology should be manipulated for sporting purposes — still persist.<br>Making genetic copies of mammals<br>In all mammals, including horses, the cloning process is similar. First, a somatic cell —a nonreproductive cell such as a skin cell — is taken from the animal to be cloned, and its nucleus, which contains the genetic information, is extracted. At the same time, scientists take an egg cell from the same species and remove its nuclear DNA, in a process called enucleation. The nucleus that was extracted from the first cell is then inserted into this “empty” egg cell.<br>Next, that egg with its new nucleus is stimulated chemically or by electrical impulses to begin dividing and form an embryo. The embryo is cultured in vitro for seven or eight days until it reaches the blastocyst stage, at which point it is implanted in a female who will carry the pregnancy to term.<br>The method is called somatic cell nuclear transfer. It was used to create Dolly the sheep in 1996, a milestone that proved it was possible to “reset” an animal’s DNA...