Adolfo Cambiaso sits slumped in a low-slung leather chair, his face almost hidden beneath the brim of a black Nike baseball cap and a pair of Dolce & Gabbana shades. He wears jeans and a gray sweatshirt, its hood pulled up over his cap to hide everything but his nose, lips, and stubbled chin. He is long and lanky, with features—when you can see them—that look like they've been lifted from a Roman sculpture.
Cambiaso's presence here, and the rock star air of ennui that his posture projects, feels slightly out of place only because we are in a stable, one of several that dot the manicured grounds of La Dolfina, the sprawling estate where Cambiaso lives near Cañuelas, about 45 minutes outside Buenos Aires. The horses in the capacious, sweet-smelling stalls behind us are gorgeous creatures, perfectly muscled, with lively eyes and glistening coats. They are polo ponies. Cambiaso rides them. Now 31, he has for years been regarded as the best polo player on the planet, and as one of his former teammates has put it, "there's no one in second place." He is the Woods, the Federer, and the Maradona of the international blue-blood set. And though he does not appear to be in a talkative mood, I ask him, given his myriad past successes, what goals can possibly remain for him.
He nods to one of the half-dozen grooms hovering nearby. The groom hustles over, takes a leather maté gourd from Cambiaso's hand, tops it off with steaming water from a thermos, and returns it. Cambiaso sips at the herbal brew through a bombilla, a metal straw. "I don't know," he says with a shrug. "That's probably the most difficult thing in my head today—where I'm going. I don't know," he says again, and frowns. "It's not easy."
But some things, Cambiaso admits, have come easy. He was granted a 10-goal handicap—the highest in polo—in the United States when he was all of 17 and two years later in Argentina, where the competition is considerably fiercer, making him the youngest human ever to play polo at that level. (Polo handicaps range from minus-2 to 10, and are meant to indicate the value of the player to the team.) "I didn't suffer that much to get there," Cambiaso says of his precocious ascent to stardom. "Everything was so quick."
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