Word: polo
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...high cost of caring for horses has sometimes led some owners to abandon their 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...
...nothing prohibited." But he's wrong. It turns out, the Food & Drug Administration confirms to TIME, that Biodyl has not been approved for use in the U.S.; and that if the horses were being injected with it, "it was illegal," says an FDA spokesperson. (See a video of polo, Afghan-style...
...horses at the University of Florida's veterinary school, say it could be days before they unravel the toxicological mystery. Florida's state Agriculture Department announced late Wednesday afternoon that almost all the horses suffered from hemorrhaging of the lungs before they collapsed. (Check out a story about elephant polo...
...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...