The horses are slick with sweat, veins bulging, feet dancing through a maelstrom of legs and mallets and flying clods of earth, 6,000 pounds of flesh tumbling after a tiny white ball. The riders are all furious angles, jabbing their mallets blindly beneath their saddles. But Adolfo Cambiaso appears calm. He lifts a gloved hand and swings the head of his mallet in a perfect arc through the tangle of horse and human to thwack the ball and send it clear toward the goal. It’s the final game of the 2016 Argentine Open—the most important polo match of the year in the most polo-obsessed country in the world—and there are some 30,000 spectators in the stands, all watching Cambiaso’s every move.
Depending upon whom 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 is 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 were not enough, he is 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.
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