The GOAT and the Pancreas - Linked | Explorer

NARRATOR: OK, there's this Argentinian guy named Adolfo Cambiaso. Many call him "The G.O.A.T of polo." You know, the sport with the horses and the sticks and the ball and all the money, like the logo on your collared shirt. Adolfo has been ranked among the world's best polo players for 22 years straight.

So random question. What is this G.O.A.T of polo have to do with a businessman named Alan and his pancreas? That actually leads to a pretty crazy story about how clones are transforming sports and your life. Well, maybe not yet, but soon.

So let's take a deeper look at how the polo G.O.A.T and the pancreas are linked. Let's start from the beginning. Meet Alan Meeker. He's a businessman-- Texas through and through-- and he loves horses. But like 30 million Americans, he's got diabetes. Clearly, being a financier and all, Meeker had a few extra and unusual resources at his disposal. And he started researching whether cloning his pancreas could cure his diabetes, and it could have changed lives.

But alas, the cloned pancreas was a no-go. But Meeker learned a lot, and he became an amateur cloning expert fascinated by what it could do for polo. So he set up a cloning company in Texas. Meeker licensed the technology that had been cloning all kinds of mammals since 1996 including a famous sheep named Dolly. So Meeker figured it wouldn't be much of a stretch to clone horses, too.

But he wanted to work with the best DNA. So he flew all the way to Argentina-- the mecca of polo. When he got there, Meeker met with that Argentinean guy we talked about earlier. You know, The G.O.A.T, Adolfo? Adolfo's prized horse died almost 10 years earlier after an injury in a championship match.

Ever the forward-thinking G.O.A.T, Adolfo saved his horse's DNA, and Meeker had to have it. Together, the two set out to clone and breed a horse army. Just kidding. Scratch that. Together, the two set out to clone and breed the best herd of polo horses on Planet Earth and revolutionize the game of polo-- #squadgoals.

And clone they did. Meeker and The G.O.A.T have created more than 25 clones of Cambiaso's champion polo horses. And their company, Crestview, has cloned more than 200 horses since 2009. Some are even breeding. And miraculously, in 2017, a polo championship was won using the DNA of those prized horses.

You heard that right. The G.O.A.T won the Argentine Open riding only cloned horses. So thanks to Alan Meeker's pancreatic problems and visionary thinking, you can now own a cloned horse of your own for upwards of a cool $100,000 US dollars. But that's not the whole story. For more, watch new episodes of Explorer on National Geographic. [music playing]