Word: lechuza
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Dates: during 2009-2009
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...animals, to sell them to slaughterhouses or to attempts at fraud in order to collect insurance. But polo is a rich man's sport and Vargas certainly does not seem to have been hurting from the care and feeding of his steeds - or skimping on providing for them. His Lechuza Caracas polo team plays around the world, and he transports his stable of 60 ponies - estimated to cost about $100,000 each - on special jets...
...investigators have yet to determine exactly what killed the animals. Lechuza's Argentine captain, Juan Martín Nero, told the Buenos Aires daily La Nación this morning he believed that tainted Biodyl, a vitamin supplement he said the team regularly gives its horses before matches to ward off exhaustion, was the culprit. "There were five [Lechuza] horses who were not given the vitamin," Nero told La Nación, "and they're the only ones that are fine." Nero insisted in the interview that Biodyl is "nothing prohibited." But he's wrong. It turns out, the Food...
Franck's, an Ocala, Fla., pharmacy, admitted in a statement Thursday that it had incorrectly mixed a medication administered to the Lechuza horses before the Sunday match. The pharmacy, citing the ongoing state investigation, would not specify what medication. But a knowledgeable source close to Lechuza tells TIME it was Biodyl, or at least a copy of it made from the same components of the vitamin. One Wellington horse veterinarian also told TIME that Biodyl, or "a compound a little off-label," is widely used in the U.S. "You don't know how many times Franck's has compounded this...
...whatever the cause, the tragedy has thrust Lechuza's obscure but powerful owner, multi-millionaire Venezuelan banker and polo fanatic Victor Vargas, into the spotlight he usually avoids. In fact, since the beginning of the week, Vargas has not been seen at the Palm Beach Polo Club in Wellington; newspaper reports in the Palm Beach Post and other South Florida media say he's either holed up in the $70 million Palm Beach mansion he purchased last year - one of six homes he owns in Venezuela, the Caribbean, the U.S. and Europe - or has flown overseas...
...what killed the animals? Nero, in the La Nación interview, insisted that Lechuza would never inject performance-enhancing steroids or other similar substances into the team's horses, not only because those substances are banned in polo-playing countries like Britain, but because "we live with them. If there's anyone who never wants to see their horses killed, it's us." Meanwhile, whether or not the horses died from being injected with anything illicit, polo figures like Neil Hirsch, owner of Black Watch, one of the U.S.'s best teams, are calling...