Battle of the clones: when will a replica horse win Olympic gold?

To the untrained eye, Tomatillo looks like any horse.

To those in the know, the 18-month-old looks like one horse.

Tomatillo is the clone of Tamarillo — a famous eventing horse who reached the Olympics in 2004.

Twelve years have passed since humans first successfully cloned a horse. The science is developing fast, but remains imperfect.

The current process takes a sample of cells from a horse’s neck, swaps the nucleus of one of those cells into an equine egg, then gives that egg a small electric shock to stimulate development before it is placed inside a recipient mare and carried to term.

Yet Tomatillo, and a handful of others, represent near-exact replicas of sporting excellence and pose an important question: are we going to start seeing clones at the world’s top equestrian events?

At the Olympic Games of the future, will a horse compete against itself for gold?

Tomatillo’s owners are Finn and Mary Guinness, who also own Tamarillo.

The Guinnesses watched British eventer William Fox-Pitt ride the latter to glory at the Olympics, World Equestrian Games and a succession of other major events until Tamarillo’s retirement in 2008.

At that point, there arose a problem.

Like many horses at the top of equestrian sport, Tamarillo is a gelding — in other words, the horse has been castrated, in the belief that geldings are calmer, easier to handle and therefore more readily prepared for the rigors of competition.

But the decision to castrate the horse is taken well before it’s apparent that the horse carries world-class genes.

It’s unlikely that Tomatillo will be among them. But it isn’t out of the question.

“Who knows? it’s very interesting to watch Tomatillo trotting, he does seem pretty similar to Tamarillo,” says Finn Guinness.

“I don’t think we’re going to be able to resist taking him a little way [in eventing], anyway. My main interest is getting his foals. We’ll see. We’re some way off all that.”

Mary Guinness says Fox-Pitt, the rider of Tamarillo, is preparing to have his second look at Tomatillo — just in case there is something there. If anyone gets to ride Tomatillo in competition, she adds, it will be him.

“People are so nervous about cloning,” she continues.

“I remember 35, 36 years ago when they had the first IVF baby and everybody thought it was a freak of science. Now it’s the norm. I tend to think that cloning will be a fairly common thing in 30 years’ time — we’re just ahead of the game, as it were.

“Tomatillo looks absolutely like any other horse you would see in the field. He doesn’t have five toes coming out of a hoof or anything like that. He’s just normal. That’s what people can’t get their heads around.”

Dr Hinrichs, in pondering the prospect of clones in sport, comes up with a suggestion many people are unlikely to get their heads around.

“I was just in a meeting,” she recalls, “where somebody argued that if you want to test the ability of a person to train a horse and ride it to the top of the field, the ultimate challenge would be to have everybody riding the same clone.

“Everybody receives a clone of the horse 10 years ago, trains it up and competes it at the Olympics. Then the variable would be the training, the upbringing, the handling and the riding.

“Is the Olympics a test of the training and riding ability, or of the horse? It’s probably the former. The Olympics is all about people, right?”

CNN