FANTASTIC FIVE

Rob Jornayvaz explains how the J5 organisation helps polo teams achieve success at high-goal level, and how it is a proponent of cloning alongside breeding

J5 is our family brand. The name comes from the five members of the Jornayvaz family: Bob, Louisa, Auna, Kaytlyn and Rob. As we began to breed horses in polo over time, our family name became the brand. It is on the name of our horse facilities in Colorado, Texas and Florida.

Since our family has taken part in polo at such a high level it has become somewhat outward facing. After years of building a large stock of quality horses, we have also helped other families and teams enter the high goal. Teams that have played with the J5

WHEN THE HORSES FROM THE POOL ARE FULLY TRAINED AT FIVE YEARS OLD, WE SPLIT THEM BETWEEN LA DOLFINA AND J5 organisation are Scone, Hawaii Polo Life, SD Farms, Dundas and many others.

The philosophy behind the J5 brand is constantly to set the standard for what “the best in the world” means. We started working with Adolfo Cambiaso over a decade ago, and our partnership with him and his family has been instrumental in creating what we all have today.

It is our goal to make a team’s first experience as enjoyable and successful as possible, as it can take many years to build an organisation that can even play at high-goal level, let alone have success. Teams that have entered the high goal with our organisation behind them have a clear leg-up on other teams starting from scratch. For example, David Paradice won the first year he competed in the US Open, a feat which many teams have tried to achieve for over a decade without success.

We breed in both the US and in Argentina. Our partnership with La Dolfina sees all of the breeding and training done in Argentina. We utilise bloodlines from both organisations and create one large pool of horses. All those horses will be born at the La Dolfina farm in the western Pampas, and then after they are broken, they will learn to play polo at the La Dolfina farm in Cañuelas. When the horses from the pool are fully trained at five years old, we then split them between La Dolfina and J5. We typically fly 10-40 per year to the US from our breeding programme in Argentina. We also leave horses there to play tournaments, including the stellar horses we think are suited to play in the Triple Crown.

In the US, we breed our horses at Owen Rinehart’s Isinya farm in Aiken, South Carolina. Typically, after the Florida season ends in April, we send our stallions and some top mares to his farm to breed. Alongside Beth Skolnik and the team in Aiken, the horses are bred and trained there get ready for game day with

PERFORMANCE WHITES 2.0 & TECHNICAL GEAR BAG

SHOP NOW until they are five or six years old. We have been very happy with the horses that have come from that process, and many of them played in the FIP World Championship.

We are very much a proponent of cloning, alongside breeding. There is a popular belief that cloning may limit the overall quality of horses in the future of the sport, and by cloning the best horse, the sport plateaus where it is currently in terms of quality. However, we believe cloning will allow us to reach the world’s next best horse even sooner.

In the past, when the best horse in the world could only produce 2-3 embryos per year, the number of stallions that mare could cross with were limited. Now, because of cloning, the best horse in the world can produce 20-30 embryos a year, allowing for a multitude of new potential combinations of bloodlines each year. Because of that, the sport will have even more top-quality bloodlines available. Even though we are at the early stages, cloning will lift the entire sport. Every corner of the world will have access to these bloodlines within the next decade, which is a net positive for the sport overall.

Cloning has also allowed new bloodlines to appear that never existed in the sport before. In the case of our gelding Wembley, we cloned him, and now have two playing stallions that have been breeding. This would not have been a possibility before cloning, and we can foresee other top geldings being cloned in the future.

Horse breeding is a mesmerising process. Seeing a foal wobbly walking after being born is truly magical. It is only amplified when you have a relationship to the parents of the foal, and you can see the similarities that they begin to develop over time. It is certainly painful when it doesn’t work out and horses have injuries or sicknesses, but no horse owner is without their fair share of disappointments. The excitement and payoff of breeding outweighs the difficulties for us at J5, and we plan to continue breeding for years to come.