Talk

After driving a couple of hours south of Buenos Aires over roads pitted with holes so deep they could swallow your car whole, you come to a nondescript crossroads. Here there’s a turn on to a dusty lane that leads to just about the most perfect polo estancia imaginable, created by the Sultan of Brunei.

I’m here. My guide, a veteran high-goal Argentine player named Marcelo Monteverde, takes me past the endless snooker-tablesmooth polo fields until at last we finally reach a line of stables that could easily be mistaken for a luxury health spa. We halt in front of a stall and my guide points his finger into the sweet-smelling shadows. ‘Beautiful pony,’ he says. ‘Speed of a rocket. Perfection,’ he whistles enviously in the direction of a sleek though smallish mare. Then he drops his voice further: ‘You know how much she is worth? You won’t believe me if I tell you. More than $100,000.’

Polo has never sold itself as a cheap game, but it will come as a shock to the uninitiated that a single animal can be worth such an enormous sum of money. And although this scene took place in the heart of Argentina, it could as easily have been in Australia, where the Packer-owned Ellerston operation has recently been snapping up ponies for up to $150,000.

You could spend even more money on a half-decent yearling racehorse, of course, but on a polo pony? British players will tell you that an exceptional young animal can usually be had at home for no more than £20,000. The reason for this discrepancy in cost can be summed up in just one word:

breeding is believing

It’s only three years since the birth of the first cloned horse, but a revolution is underway. So just how much progress has been made among the brave new attempts to produce the perfect polo pony?

WORDS SANDY MITCHELL

breeding. And the breeding of ponies such as the prime specimen in the Brunei estancia is undergoing a revolution driven entirely by science. We’re looking at a near-future where cloning and sex selection will produce the ultimate in highly sought-after polo ponies.

Professor ‘Twink’ Allen, Britain’s leading equine reproduction expert and director of Newmarket’s Equine Fertility Unit, explains the difference science is already making: ‘The Argentines realised that you just can’t rely on throw-out racehorses to produce a decent polo pony. You need an animal bred and especially selected for the job.’ The solution was to invest in biotechnology so that eggs could be harvested from the most promising donor mares, fertilised artificially with the semen of a very carefully chosen stallion, and the resulting embryos grown in the wombs of workaday recipient mares.

‘As soon as their major competition ends in Buenos Aires, all the good mares go straight off to stud for three or four months, where their embryos are collected and then transferred. They’re doing embryo transfers in very large numbers,’ says Professor Allen. And the Argentines are not alone. There are breeders in several other countries, such as Australia, who have developed their own embryo-transfer operations on a vast scale.

This is only the beginning of the new wave of changes in reproductive technology that will transform breeding and widen the gap yet further between the best polo ponies and the average in Britain. Sex-selection using new spinning-semen techniques to produce foals of the desired gender are already possible with around 95 per cent accuracy, and genetic cloning to reproduce treasured ponies has finally arrived.

Yet it’s been a bare three years since Professor Pieraz Pioggia Cesare successfully cloned the first horse to international acclaim. The foal, named Prometea, and produced in Italy by a university-based reproductive technology laboratory, was a carbon copy of its mother – a Haflinger mare. Back then, cloning techniques were far from reliable: out of more than 800 embryos involved in the experiment, only Promotea

If you breed from a prize mare by embryo transfer there is no risk of her succumbing to complications, since it is another mare that acts as the birth mother

survived the whole process through to birth.

And now? A company based in Texas has recently launched the first fully commercial cloning operation aimed at sport horses in the UK, including polo ponies. ‘What we can offer is a cloning service, so we can create an identical twin pony, regardless of gender,’ boasts Brian Bruner, the sales and marketing manager for ViaGen Inc. ‘If the animal we are cloning is a gelding, our techniques would enable us to produce an intact colt.’

ViaGen acknowledges cloning is still not 100 per cent successful, yet it says an initial group of 20 cloned competition horses is due to be born this spring and that so far, all the pregnancies appear to be perfectly normal.

‘Somatic cell nuclear transfer’, as the company’s technique is known, starts with a very simple tissue biopsy. A piece of flesh, about the size of a pea, is taken from the chosen animal and then broken down into individual cells. Next, an unfertilised egg is removed from a donor mare and replaced with the genetic material from the animal to be cloned. The final stage is to implant the egg in a surrogate mare.

Cloning does not come cheap. ViaGen is currently charging around $150,000 for each cloned animal, although this figure is sure to lower as the technique is improved.

There may be another obstacle to the appearance of cloned ponies on the polo field, however. In the horse-racing world, foals bred via such an established technique as artificial insemination, are banned by the Jockey Club from competition, so could it be that polo’s governing body would disqualify cloned ponies from tournaments? Every indication at this early stage is that the Hurlingham Polo Association is unlikely to impose any restrictions. ‘If the cloned product was deemed fit and healthy to play, I don’t see that we’d have any trouble with it at all,’ says David Morley, chairman of the association’s pony welfare committee.

In the meantime, a rather different type of cutting-edge technique has also begun to impact on pony breeding: sex selection. Again, it’s the Argentines who are using a machine enabling them to ‘spin’ semen and turn out filly after filly with a high degree of reliability so that breeders can benefit from the great premium they attract. At the same time, an American company called XY Inc has established the global rights to what it asserts is the most accurate and ‘only proven method of gender selection’. The so-called flow cytometry process involves staining the DNA of the spermatozoa with a dye and separating out the more fluorescent Xchromosome-bearing [filly] spermatozoa.

But what do these new techniques offer polo players? Certainly, embryo transfer has huge advantages over breeding naturally. If you breed from a prize mare by embryo transfer there is no risk of her succumbing to complications during pregnancy or birth, since it is another mare altogether that acts as the birth mother. Which means, of course, that you can continue to play polo on the donor mare, breeding from her all the while.

You quickly start to wonder why such a proven method is not more widely used in Britain. It’s not as if our polo industry is starved of money, and our biotechnology industry is certainly not backward in any way. Yet amazingly, there is only one laboratory dedicated to breeding polo ponies in England, and that’s the Beaufort Polo Club Equine Embryo Transfer Unit near Tetbury. This laboratory produces 25 to 30 foals a year using a non-surgical technique. It’s run by Emma Tomlinson (a Cambridge-trained vet from the celebrated polo clan) in conjunction with Argentine breeding specialist, Fernando Riera.

‘Embryo transfers mean you can focus your breeding on to better bloodlines and shorten the generations,’ says Tomlinson. ‘Slowly, the price of young ponies in Britain is increasing, and the availability of good ones decreasing, so that is bound to create interest in breeding via embryo transfer.’

So if the rest of the polo-playing world is making full use of this technology, is British polo in danger of being left behind? Professor Allen, for one, thinks so: ‘The majority of today’s top-class polo ponies have been begotten by embryo transfer, which has shown there’s a much better chance of getting a high-quality result. I’m utterly disillusioned by the pathetically amateurish British attitude to breeding.’

But Professor Allen’s fiercest disdain is reserved not for British breeders, rather its for the Home Office, which turned down his Fertility Centre’s application for a licence to implant mares with cloned embryos.

Cloning is arguably of much greater significance in other competitive horse sports; polo players generally prefer to play on fillies since geldings are thought to be slightly more timid, and can take an extra year to ‘make’. However, the cloning of geldings to produce stud animals could still be hugely important in the polo field, as Andrew Seavill’s experience suggests.

‘I have a particularly good gelding at the moment. I cut him, and since then he’s shaping up to be a really nice pony. I’d be kicking myself if it turns out I can’t breed from him. If I could clone this gelding, he’d be a perfect complement to our stallion,’ says Seavill rather wistfully.

So is this advanced technique likely to become a major influence on polo-pony breeding? Emma Tomlinson’s answer is wholly unexpected. ‘Unfortunately, yes. I’m sure it’ll take off. There’s only so much you want to muck around with nature. If you attack it too much it bites back.’

Her pained comment raises the thought that the old-fashioned, ‘amateurish’ British way of breeding may have its merits after all. Maybe, just maybe, our breeders and polo players will one day be able to congratulate themselves on cussedly sticking to the natural way, and thereby avoiding the pitfalls set to befall their more daring and forward-thinking competitors.

Overleaf One of the first foals born this spring by embryo transfer at New Bridge Embryo, South Carolina This page Professor Pieraz Pioggia Cesare, who cloned the first ever horse, pictured with a foster mare, Pioggia and her cloned foal, Pieraz II

rough justice

We all know that life has become more and more litigious. We also know that polo is a dangerous sport. Something needs to be done to keep lawyers off the pitch – and it needs to be done fast

WORDS RORY KNIGHT BRUCE

It is often possible to view personal liability insurance like a gloomy postilion on Mr Pickwick’s coach, while inside, hipflasks and stoles are keeping out the snowflakes. Accidents are quite simply something that happen to other people.

In polo, the whole ethos of the game –combative elegance, gleaming ponies and closely cut lawns – does not readily want to be intruded upon by injury or litigation.

One high-profile case, involving former England Captain Howard Hipwood, spent eight years in the French courts. It resulted in a settlement of £5 million paid to Alain Bernard, plus £60,000 in legal fees paid for by the Royal Sun Alliance. The claim was met by the insurance scheme of the sport’s governing body, the Hurlingham Polo Association, to which players must belong.

It was a normal summer’s day for Hipwood as he prepared to compete in the Lancel Cup at Deauville. It ended with Bernard, the wealthy French banker and tournament sponsor, in a coma. ‘We were involved in a “ride-off ” situation,’ says Hipwood, 55. ‘Alain’s pony stumbled and fell and consequently he fell badly too.’

The relationship between professional polo players like Hipwood and amateurs is one of regard. ‘There is no need to go in hard on them,’ says Hipwood. ‘That is not in the spirit of the game. And it’s not just because they sponsor us, you simply don’t need to muscle in.’ Of his relationship with Bernard, he volunteers: ‘He was a sporting acquaintance, we were on friendly terms.’

What followed, however, was anything but friendly, as Hipwood found himself being sued by Bernard for in excess of £5 million. Originally this was thrown out by the French courts, mainly because neither umpire considered that a foul had been committed. It also emerged that Bernard had apparently suffered concussion on several occasions previously, as a result of falls.

Bernard’s case also exposed an anomaly in the rules of polo, which are at variance in different countries. In France, a claim is more likely to succeed if the injured party – as was the case here – is ridden off by a player on a larger pony. Also, in France, a professional is not allowed to ride-off an amateur.

But alarms bells are ringing, not only among HPA officials, but with wealthy players, too, who fear they may be wrongly or actively sued if involved in an accident. ‘Players are unlikely to sue you or me because they won’t get very far, but for the super rich it could be a different story,’ says Chris Bethell, polo manager at Cowdray Park.

Yet the whole notion of one player suing another goes against the spirit of the game. There is a tacit acceptance when you get on a polo pony, you take on the attendant dangers that go with it. As things stand, adults pay

Alarm bells are ringing among wealthy players who fear they may be wrongly or actively sued if in an accident

£95 a year for insurance as part of their membership of the HPA and students pay a more modest £35. This includes public liability insurance. But Chris Bethell believes that additional player-to-player insurance will have to come too.

‘The problem for professionals is they need affordable insurance,’ says Bethell. Professionals struggle enough, he adds, to balance the books and earn a living. The more people taking out insurance and making claims, the more expensive it’ll be.

It is a problem being addressed by Piers Plunkett of City specialist equine insurers, Hamilton and Partners. He believes polo has to adapt to a form of bespoke insurance similar to that which operates in the thoroughbred world.

‘Sadly, it is only a matter of time before someone gets “T-boned” by a big patron and decides to go after him for compensation,’ says Plunkett. He feels that players must understand the risks of the game and should take out personal liability insurance commensurate with their financial circumstances.

He accepts that, in insurance terms, polo ponies cannot be viewed as if they were machines. ‘A certain amount of risk must be accepted, as it is in racing with jockeys, by those who get up and ride.’

Balanced against this is the litigious climate that he sees rolling into Britain from America. To this end, he will shortly propose to the HPA that they examine player-to-player insurance in addition to the existing blanket third party insurance for property damage and bodily injury.

He also believes that a worldwide standardisation of the rules of polo would avoid such anomalies as the Hipwood case. So what would individually tailored, comprehensive player-to-player insurance cost and would it be within the financial reach of both professional players and teenagers increasingly being drawn to the sport? Plunkett thinks it should be geared to age and handicap, starting at £30 per £50,000 insured for teenagers, and rising to £90 per £50,000 for adults.

Whatever happens, the insurance debate in polo has a long way to run.

Left: It was in a similar ride-off situation as this, between an amateur team patron and a pro, that caused banker Alain Bernard to successfully sue former England Captain Howard Hipwood, for over £5 million

16

back to the future

To mark the 75th anniversary of its invention, Swiss watchmaker Jaeger-LeCoultre has relaunched its classic Reverso polo watch

WORDS MARIA DALTON

Figure this (above, left) The original designs for the Reverso show how detailed the workings had to be.

One to watch (top, right) The new Reverso Squadra Hometime, from £3,250, is a sophisticated update on the original.

Out of time (bottom, right) The Reverso has been a favourite among polo players since the 1930s. The Reverso was born of necessity and, 75 years on, its success proves that function-led design can be the elixir of eternal youth. In the early 1930s, during the days of British Colonial rule in India, and before the invention of resilient crystal, officers found their watches being shattered by errant polo-balls during particularly rambunctious chukkas.

The problem of the polo player’s watch came to the attention of César de Trey, who was visiting India. Returning to Europe with tales of elephants, maharajas and a smashed watch in his pocket, he worked with his business partner and watchmaker, Jacques-David LeCoultre, to develop a timepiece capable of withstanding great impact.

Ever inventive, LeCoultre looked beyond the serene and isolated Vallée de joux for a solution more ingenious than simply a watch with a cover. Paris, in full Art Deco swing, was where he turned and commissioned the French engineer René-Alfred Chauvot to create a solution.

And so the Reverso, perhaps the world’s first purpose-built sports watch, was launched. The solution was brilliant in its simplicity. The rectangular case slides along a track on ball-bearings to swivel 180 degrees and return to its casing, face down. Thus the watch could be safely worn while playing polo. Then simply swivel and click and its dials are back up for G&T time.

The success of this newfangled timepiece was probably as much to do with its practicality and built-in fiddle appeal as its streamlined Art Deco looks and cosmopolitan air. Even though the arrival of unbreakable glass a few years later made the original use for the Reverso redundant, such was its acceptance amongst the non-polo playing crowd, it remained a favourite and an icon.

Taken up by many watch manufacturers as a new style, the Reverso has proved very adaptable. From the simplest engraving on the blank steel back to elaborate works of art in enamel, the style has afforded watchmakers many ways to add pleasure and intimacy to the daily act of strapping on a watch.

Since its invention, the rectangular case has been enriched with a dozen watch complications, having double the space for ingenuity. The minute repeater, tourbillon and perpetual calendar are just some of the complications the world of high horology has introduced to this sports watch. Women, too, have adopted the Reverso and many like the idea of the “two-in-one” watch (a Duetto), where an elegant watch for the day can be transformed into a bejewelled face for the evening, or a bracelet with yellow-diamond butterflies fluttering across a gold canvas.

Today, the Reverso looks as fresh as the day it was born and now comes in a resilient square case to keep up with trends in horology design: this year, Jaeger-LeCoultre launched three new square models (known as the Squadra), all of which offer different time-zone functions that polo-players will find particularly useful. Whether to check the time at home when playing away, or to see if it’s a reasonable hour in Buenos Aires to call the trainer, this vital piece of polo kit is as relevant today as it was to those chukka-happy officers in India all those years ago.