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The Hurlingham Polo Association

magazine

Spring 2005

PERFECT

GOLD! WHITE BIRCH WINS US OPEN ENGLAND EXPECTS… at last EXCLUSIVE: Ginger Baker beats the drum for polo Cover6.indd 1

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Everyone dreams of being a 10 goaler.

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THE HURLINGHAM CLUB drew up the first proper rules of polo in 1875 and although polo is no longer played there, the club gave its name to the Hurlingham Polo Association as the national governing body for the game of polo. What better title for a new magazine devoted to the game than Hurlingham?

When I started to play the game in Malta in 1950, there was much discussion about whether the game could be revived after the lapse of the war years. All the pre-war players were six years older, while there were not many potential players who might be able to afford what has always been an expensive sport. However, thanks largely to the enthusiasm of John Cowdray and a handful of devoted pre-war players, the game got going again surprisingly quickly. By the 1970s, it was going really well but it took another 20 years to reach its present state.

This sounds as if the game has remained unchanged.

There may not have been any dramatic changes to the rules, but almost everything else about the structure of polo: how it is played, who plays it, where it is played, who watches it and the whole international nature of the game has developed beyond all recognition.

Launching any new publication is always a difficult business but my impression is that the general interest in the game justifies the Hurlingham Polo Association’s confidence in this initiative. I have little doubt that this first issue of Hurlingham will be a great success and that it will be the fore-runner of many more.

Patron Hurlingham Polo Association

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foreword You do not have to look too deeply into the statistics to realise that polo is expanding fast. Each year, since 2001, there have been more members, more clubs springing up throughout the country, more private grounds, more Pony Club teams, more schools participating and more of our up and coming players going to Argentina in the winter.

Like all sports, the expansion and development of polo amongst the young is crucial to the future. I believe it is essential that the HPA encourages as many people as possible to play first and then to improve. There is no doubt that an increased pool of playing youngsters will enhance the chances of discovering more talent.

Even so, the hurdles that have to be jumped before a player can become a successful professional are considerable and it is by no means a secure career. The competition is fierce and success is dependant not only on having great talent and a certain amount of luck, but the ability to survive when things are not going so well.

Hence, while we should encourage the younger generation we must also make it clear just how small is the eye of the needle.

For many years we have fielded the England team only once a year, on Cartier International Day. The day has established itself as a major event of the summer season, alongside such occasions as Royal Ascot, Wimbledon and the Boat Race. Successful development of the England team is fundamental to the development of polo in this country and it is therefore important that both our established and future England players are able to play as a coached and properly managed team more often, both here and overseas.

Polo is a competitive sport, played by highly competitive individuals. The game has always been noisy and the language colourful. If an umpire is being idle, teams will spot it very quickly and be justifiably discontented. If the officials are doing their best, even though the umpiring may not be perfect, teams and individual players must behave in a sportsman-like way during and after a match. It is not an easy game to umpire but clubs have to accept greater responsibility for raising the standard and, in particular, for making sure that players umpire to the best of their ability.

In any business, communication is all-important. Without it, people tend to hear what they want to hear, and gossip and rumours soon become fact. I therefore welcome this magazine, which plans to keep members in the picture about what is happening in polo in England and around the world, while also raising some of the important issues which face us. I commend Hurlingham to all our members, to all our sponsors and to the wider public for whom I hope polo will become a greater part of their lives.

Christopher Hanbury Chairman Hurlingham Polo Association

Editor Mark Palmer Associate Editor Herbert Spencer Art Director William Harvey Picture Editor Craig Dean Sub-Editor Glyn George Contributing Editor Clare Milford Haven Publisher Roderick Vere Nicoll Front cover: Stefano Marsaglia scores at the end of the fourth chukka and knows he has won the Gold Cup. Picture by Paul Hulbert

Hurlingham is published on behalf of The Hurlingham Association by Hurlingham Media.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, photocopying or otherwise, without prior permission of the publisher and copyright owner. Whilst every effort has been made to ensure the accuracy of the information in this publication, the publisher accepts no responsibility for errors or omissions.

The products and services advertised are those of individual authors and are not necessarily endorsed by or connected with the publisher or the Hurlingham Polo Association. The editorial opinions expressed in this publication are those of individual authors and not necessarily those of the publisher or Hurlingham Polo Association.

Hurlingham magazine welcomes feedback from readers about our first issue. We would also like to hear from writers and photographers keen to contribute in the future Hurlingham Media County Hall Riverside Building London SE1 7PB Tel: 44 (0)20 7152 4040 Fax: 44 (0)20 7152 4001 email: hurlingham@hpa-polo.co.uk www.hpa-polo.co.uk HURLINGHAM, (ISSN TBC), is published four times per year by Hurlingham Media, County Hall, Riverside Building, London SE1 7PB and is distributed in the USA by SPP, 75 Aberdeen Road, Emigsville, PA. 17318-0437.

Periodicals postage paid @ Emigsville, PA. POSTMASTER: send address changes to HURLINGHAM, c/o PO Box 437, Emigsville, PA 17318-0437.

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contents spring 2005

6 Ponylines A round-up of the latest news, gossip, opinion and future trends around the circuit

FEATURES

16 The season’s diary A complete guide to this summer’s fixtures – and full list of HPA clubs around the country

HERBERT SPENCER

12 Bachelor Boys They’re young, dashing, daring – and unattached. Meet England’s eligible national team. By Adam Edwards

Left: Romano Vercellino and England’s Andrew Blake-Thomas at FIP World Cup

18 Crème de la Cream

38 Top of the Range

54 Veuve Clicquot Gold Cup

Inspired by the beat of a different drum, legendary drummer Ginger Baker outlines his lifelong love of polo

Saddle up with Clare Milford Haven’s essential guide to what’s hot this season

It was one of the most exciting of all time – and the highest scoring final in the coveted trophy’s 50-year history

22 Picking up the Reins

Follow the elephant polo crowd to Thailand, and bathe in luxury. By Sophie Campbell

With the demise of fox hunting, could polo fill the void for thousands of disgruntled horsemen, asks Rory Knight Bruce

40 The Herd Instinct THE ACTION

57 Cape of New Hope Looking to expand your polo horizons?

South Africa is the answer

60 Polo with Altitude

26 Tribute To Gonzalo Tanoira

44 Chantilly Chic

The death of the Argentine star robbed polo of one of its greatest figures. Alberto P Heguy pays homage

France’s Capitol of the Horse opens its magnificent gates to the polo federation’s world championship

28 Calypso Kings in a Spin

48 Florida Extravaganza

Royalty and showbiz join forces to celebrate an eventful International Day at Windsor

Can the West Indies recapture their glory days at cricket? With difficulty, says voice of cricket Henry Blofeld

It’s where the Gold Coast glitters around Palm Beach and home to the biggest new polo club in three decades

PASSING THOUGHT

32 The Ride of my Life

51 Land of Open Glory

Alastair Vere Nicoll is blown away by his Antarctic journey – but his greatest adventure was still to come

A new format has made the Argentine Open even more of a battle royal between superstar teams

From the Cresta Run to the Kremlin, snow polo is the ultimate winter warmer

62 Cartier International

64 A unique bond Roger Scruton celebrates the special relationship between man and horse

contributors Rory Knight Bruce Rory has been joint master of the United Pack and Tedworth foxhounds and sole master and huntsman of the Torrington Farmers’ foxhounds. He has worked on the staff of the Spectator and Evening Standard, where he was once accused by his editor of putting a horse in his company car. He has hunted with more than 200 packs, many as a correspondent for Horse & Hound, and is now turning his attention to polo.

Clare Milford Haven As Tatler’s Social Editor, Clare might be thought to have the perfect job: she gets paid to party. The rest of the time, she can be found at her polo farm in West Sussex, where she lives with husband George and their five children. Recently incapacitated due to breaking her arm and jaw at the end of last season, she is nonetheless looking forward to playing in the 8 and 12 goal at Cowdray Park.

Henry Blofeld “Blowers” was a decent cricketer until suffering a nasty bus accident in his late teens. Even so, he went on to gain a Blue at Cambridge. He began writing about cricket for The Times in the early 1960s, before lurching most of the way around Fleet Street. He joined the BBC’s Test Match Special team in 1972 and has been a regular member ever since. He has never hit a polo ball in his life.

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news… gossip… opinion…

Polo is a sport on which people get hooked. Some players’ current and deposit accounts are emptied and the summer escape for their wives or girlfriends becomes a distant memory, replaced by hours on the side of a windswept ground, unable to depart from a specific spot in case a new 52 [stick] is needed.

During the drive home, a player’s companion says little. The game was muddled and dull.

Her husband was often in the wrong place and when he was in the right place, he missed the ball or fouled. He is full of chat, how well his ponies went, how bad the umpiring was and how his team should have won. He is brimming with passion and already planning the next game.

It was this passion and commitment to the sport that led Roderick Vere Nicoll (a player who of course does not ever foul or miss the

ball) to put together a team to produce this magazine for members of the HPA and polo players worldwide. I hope you will enjoy it and, more important, I hope you will provide plenty of feedback to Hurlingham Media.

As the game expands, new problems arise but it is interesting to note – when looking back through the minutes – how many of the old chestnuts remain scattered on the ground before us. These are just some of the ongoing challenges: The late Lord Mountbatten tried to produce a set of International Rules for polo back in 1938. We have still failed to achieve one set which is accepted by everybody for international matches.

Accurate handicapping is crucial for a fair competitive match, but to divide nearly 3,000 UK players into 12 different levels is not easy.

At the lower end, the difference in standard between a good 0 and a bad 0 can be huge. A proposal to introduce handicaps from 0 to 20 has, to date, been resolutely opposed by the Argentine Polo Association. The historic status of reaching 10 goals is well established and of course the problem is not at the top level. An increasing number of individuals do improve between seasons by playing overseas. The old

custom whereby handicaps from the previous season are unlikely to be changed until the end of the next season has already been modified here and in the United States but, if teams are to be fairly handicapped, the Handicap Committee must adopt a flexible and rapid response. This in turn places a considerable onus on the members of the Handicap Committee who are unpaid, mostly very busy, and sometimes have a conflict of interest and thus cannot vote.

In this country, polo is a pro-am sport. It is one of the few where the person funding the team can actually take part. This is one of its great strengths but also one of its limitations in that it is reliant on individuals with no interest in any financial return. This means there is no real incentive to attract prize money. It is the patrons who lay the golden egg for the clubs and the professional players. Most accept any conditions placed upon them with good grace, as part of the game, but many feel that they should be given greater freedom of choice in the make up of their teams.

Linked to the above is the question of how the HPA should look after the interests of the English players. There are strong views held by all parties. But polo is no different

SOUND THE TRUMPETS

HERBERT SPENCER

Mighty things from small beginnings grow, as Dryden liked to say, and one fine example of this must be the Guards Polo Club. It is difficult to believe that a mere 50 years ago one of the world’s leading clubs consisted of nothing more than two grounds, 20 or so members and a small canvas tent for Pimms and tea.

The 50th anniversary celebrations were launched towards the end of April with a grand ball at a convenient venue just up the road. The Windsor Castle ball was hosted by the club’s president and his wife, who happen also to live in the castle much of the year.

Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh are popular hosts and the £1,000 tickets were sold out within days. Disappointed members will still have the chance to rub shoulders with the monarch and her consort when the club throws an anniversary bash beside the Queens Ground at Smith’s Lawn in Windsor Great Park on June 12, with room for 4,000 in a marquee. For this event, tickets are a modest £50, available only to the more than 1,000 playing and social members of Guards but with many of English polo’s good and great invited.

Guards is also the host club for the Hurlingham Polo Association’s flagship Cartier International Day, an annual event that attracts upwards of 20,000 spectators and has become a landmark of the English season. This is the world’s biggest one-day polo event and takes place on July 24 this year, with the Queen expected to preside.

After the festivities are over, says Guards chairman Paul Belcher, ‘we will be starting our second half-century with major developments: a new £1.5million clubhouse, two new high-goal grounds and a polo arena at Flemish Farm and the rebuilding of several grounds at Smiths Lawn. This will give us a total of 10 tournament grounds at the two locations.’

Sound the trumpets, as Dryden also liked to say.

Jose Donoso, Alejandro Vial and Henry Brett in action at the 2004 Cartier International

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…from the ponylines to any other sport. To be successful, you have to be hugely talented but also totally committed and dedicated. The patron expects to employ a professional who is just that, but sometimes the patron has been disappointed and the image of the English professional has been severely damaged. Tim Henman will probably have been practising his serve for two hours and Tiger Woods will almost certainly have hit over a 1,000 balls down the driving range before some polo professionals have even got out of bed – and both those individuals already have healthy bank accounts. There is much talk of a level playing field, but polo has become a global business and a player has to be able to compete and win in the global market if he is to enjoy sustainable long term success.

Players have to market themselves as a value for money resource and the image of the English professional needs a makeover.

We live in a world of increasing bureaucracy.

People are frightened of accidents, not because of the injury that they may receive or accidentally inflict but because of the danger that they might be sued. The Health and Safety Executive seems content to increase the burdens on organisations with little regard to the cost.

The tentacles of the EU spread ominously into unexpected areas. It is becoming increasingly difficult to play any game with one’s friends just for fun The imposition of increasing bureaucracy drives a wedge between those who are responsible for making sure that the rules and laws are passed on and those who actually have to implement them.

Issues such as these tend to be problems but there is also much that is positive. Polo is expanding in every respect – clubs, private grounds, members, schools, Pony Club teams and sponsorship. The press coverage last year of polo was the most extensive it has been for a long time. The choice of players for a 24 Goal England team is extensive and the competition fierce. The target in the next three years is to produce not only a 30 goal team but a 30 goal team for which there is genuine choice and competition.

Let us look forward to an exciting new season. And let’s all work together to make sure that polo itself takes some giant strides forward this summer.

David Woodd Chief Executive Hurlingham Polo Association

Olympian heights From Dark Side Of The Moon to polo under the bright lights of Olympia in central London might seem an unlikely rite of passage, but that’s what is happening later this year.

Bryan Morrison, who promoted the likes of Pink Floyd, the Bee Gees, Wham!, The Jam, and George Michael and once filled the Royal Albert Hall for a fashion show with leading socialites as the models, is taking polo to the people of the big smoke with an England v USA match in the exhibition centre famous for its horse shows.

Morrison, who is owner of Royal County of Berkshire Polo Club and chairman of the HPA’s Arena Polo Committee, confirms: “We’ll have the top high-goal arena professionals from both sides of the Atlantic Bryan Morrison and his wife Greta battling it out. It will be a great showcase for

polo. So many Londoners have never seen a match and don’t realise what a tough and exciting sport it is.”

Talking of bringing the king of games to new and unfamiliar places, Yorkshire’s horse-loving public received an introduction to the sport this month when Beverley Polo Club staged two exhibitions of three-man arena polo at the British Open Show Championships in Sheffield. Yorkshire is traditionally big hunting country, but most of the captive audience gathered for the jumping competition was getting its first look at the toughest of all horse sports.

Londoners may be a greater challenge but if any man can fill the 7,500 seats at Olympia on December 20, that man is Bryan Morrison.

Where are you, Harvey?

“The male is a domestic animal which, if treated with firmness, can be trained to do most things” once famously wrote our English national treasure, author Jilly Cooper.

Unfortunately this has turned out not to be the case in her latest business venture.

The novelist, who writes all her books on a manual typewriter called Monica and hates to be described as the author of ‘bonkbusters’, was delighted when Sir David Frost and a production company in which he has a stake bought the film rights to her steamy – not a ‘bonk-buster’ – novel Polo.

Now, however, to Jilly’s disappointment, the project looks doomed following the collapse of the production company. She is searching for a more reliable backer. Come in Harvey Weinstein.

Jilly plays down the idea that supermodels Kate Moss, above right, and polo-playing Jodie Kidd, above left, were offered roles. “Kate had lunch with the producer, that’s as far as it went,” she says. “She and Jodie might be decorative as misbehaving polo wives or groupies, but the real question is who would be best for the lead role of Ricky, the hero, a complex and tortured polo player.” Suggestions on a postcard, please.

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Polo Club on May 29.

During the season Prince Charles will be joined on occasion by one or both of his sons; Harry’s Princes William and Harry made an early start to the participation will depend upon his schedule as a Windsors’ annual season of charity exhibition matches new cadet at Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. when they helped raise close to £40,000 for the postLast season the Windsors’ polo helped to raise tsunami regeneration programme, playing in the arena upwards of £950,000 at Longdole in Gloucesfor some 30 charitershire, new club of HPA ties, chosen by Prince chairman Christopher Charles from amongst Hanbury. the hundreds of Robert ffrench-Blake, Exwhich he is president tra-Equerry to the Prince or patron. Over the of Wales who manages years Prince Charles’s polo for the prince, said charity matches at the event was all the idea home and abroad have of William and Harry and raised tens of millions their grooms. “We’ve had of pounds for a wide great fun”, William said. variety of good causes, “This is a very worthwhile Prince William, left and Prince Harry ranging from a small cause and we are just hospice in Wales to helping to save the black rhino pleased we can do something to help.” in Africa. His charity polo activities started more Scoreline: Harry’s team 12, William’s 7.

From May through July, according to ffrench-Blake, than 30 years ago when he was a regular competithe royals will be playing around 18 charity matches at tor and have continued unabated after a bad back several polo clubs or private grounds around the counforced his retirement from tournament play in try. The first, after the highly successful fund-raiser at 1992. William and Harry began joining their father Longdole, will be for the Kuoni World Cup in aid of the in charity exhibition matches soon after they took Prince’s of Wales Initiative in India at Hurtwood Park up the ‘game of kings’ in 1998.

Chukkas for charity

traditional patron-sponsored polo will continue to flourish, we believe that a new audience can be attracted to watching the sport at a high professional level.”

The BPE teams, handicapped around 24-26 goals, have a large proportion of homegrown British pros. They are funded by corporate sponsors rather than playing patrons with low handicaps.

The organisation is planning for five teams in 2005 – each bearing the name of a country – playing league matches at Coworth Park during the week starting July 25 with the finals on July 31.

Public admission is only £5, but BPE is also offering VIP hospitality packages at up to £299, with lunch catered for

by TV chef Ross Burden, plus an Argentine barbecue in the evening.

Going Dutch Bang on Polo-playing drummer Kenney Jones showed where his heart really lies when he scheduled dates for the coast-to-coast USA tour of his group, The Jones Gang, so he can be back home to play with the Prince of Wales in a celebrity charity match in aid of The Prince’s Trust.

Kenney, (below, with his wife Jayne) will jet in from the States in time for the May 29 event, grandly titled the Kuoni World Cup, at his Hurtwood Park Polo Club in Surrey.

Line-ups for the match

include the prince, Kenney and his 16-year old son Jay; fellow musician Mike Rutherford of Mike And The Mechanics and Genesis fame and his son Tom; American Hart To Hart star Stephanie Powers; and Howard Smith, son of Hurtwood Park polo manager, George.

Look for a clutch of Kenney’s fellow music-world chums in the marquee.

practice grounds as a track to exercise the 1,200 ponies stuck in the mud of corrals and roads.’

To catch up after the rain finally stopped and the turf dried out, Susan ran a staggering 43 tournament matches in one single weekend on Eldorado’s 12 grounds. Does anyone know of a higher weekend count?

Watch this space Rain stops play A record must have been set for tournament polo this winter in California’s Cochinella Valley.

Rare downpours in a region of the world where it usually takes megatons of imported water to make the desert bloom around Palm Springs played havoc with the schedule this winter at Eldorado Polo Club, the largest in North America.

‘There’s been nothing like it for more than a decade,’ said Eldorado’s veteran polo manager Susan Stovall. ‘We lost a good seven days of play and had to use one of our

Polo has long been the Cinderella of horse sports on TV but it seems to have found a Prince Charming in Nigel a’ Brassard, director of British Polo Enterprises (BPE). According to Nigel’s carefully researched figures, BPE gained a television audience of 2.5million for its first all-professional British Polo Championship, sponsored by Netjets, at Coworth Park Polo Club in 2004. He thinks this is a world record and is looking to attract even more viewers for the tournament this summer.

‘We believe the sport is at a watershed,’ Nigel said. ‘While

Some ten teams are expected to contest the European Eight-goal Championship of the Federation of International Polo (FIP) in the Netherlands in September. The sport is now played throughout Europe, from Ireland to Greece and Finland to Portugal.

Meanwhile, the Federation is deciding the venue for its 2007 World Cup during its Council of Administration meeting in Sotogrande in May. Nations bidding to hold the VIIIth World Championship include Spain, Italy, Brazil, Mexico and, it is reported, Argentina. FIP officials have been globetrotting to inspect the candidates’ facilities.

Rizzo on the rise Peter Rizzo has been confirmed as Executive Director of the US Polo Association (USPA). Peter, a three-goal player, has served for almost a year as interim director, commuting from his home in Florida to USPA offices in Lexington, Kentucky.

He has been general manager of the Royal Palm Polo and Sports Club in Boca Raton for many years and publisher

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off the shelf

Smith’s Lawn: History Of Guards Polo Club 1955-2005 Illustrated book by JNP Watson, former polo correspondent of The Times, to mark this year’s Golden Jubilee of Europe’s highest-profile club founded by the Duke of Edinburgh. Includes reminisces of

of the monthly magazine Polo Players Edition that his wife, Gwen, edits. The USPA Board of Governors has been discussing moving the association’s HQ down to Florida from Blue Grass country, Kentucky being a bit away from mainstream polo.

famous players who have competed former Argentine on the Windsor Park grounds. player and Quiller Press UK at £40. eminent polo historian. With Visions Of Polo 413 pages and Coffee table book by Elizabeth more than Furth, author-photographer of 10,000 entries on similar works on show jumping players, ponies, and dressage. Its more than 300 clubs, cups, and pages have some 400 colour everything to do photographs from major venues in with the sport.

Europe, North and South America, Published by McFarlands USA, and Australia, accompanied by cover price $49.95 evocative text. Published in May by Kenilworth Press UK at £29.95.

Playmaker Polo The latest offering by Ireland’s The Polo Encyclopedia Hugh Dawney, veteran international Meticulously researched and instructor, coach and author. Detailed authoritative reference work by Dr instruction for both beginners and Horace Laffaye of Connecticut, more advanced players, plus history

Future stars Having retired from competition after more than 40 years, the HPA’s new chairman, Christopher Hanbury, is now concentrating on the training of new generations of players at his own Longdole club in England and on an Argentine estancia in which he owns a share.

Christopher has convinced local Gloucestershire schools to send youngsters to Longdole for an introduction to the sport as part of their official school activities. Some 80 boys and girls showed up for first lessons with Christopher’s polo manager, Rob Cudmore, from Australia, and more will follow. For those who want to continue, there will be opportunities to travel to Argentina to further their polo education.

The HPA chairman got his own start in the game at nearby Cirencester Park Polo Club and, after he joined the army, sparked one of the largest financial investments ever made in the sport, that of the royal family of tiny, oil-rich Brunei on the island of Borneo. As equerry to the ruling Sultan, he taught the chief-of-state and his two brothers to play, after which the Sultan founded the Jerudong Park Polo Club in the capital, which is ‘still unique in the polo world,’ says Christopher.

Christopher continues to work for His Majesty, and the Sultan has played numerous charity matches in England, helping to raise vast sums for a variety of good causes.

Shivraj Singh, the Maharajah of Jodhpur’s son and heir, may never play polo again after a fall in a Jaipur match that put him in a coma this winter.

The 29-year-old yuvraj [crown prince, above with his father) was flown down to Mumbai (Bombay) where surgeons operated for two and a half hours to relieve pressure on his brain. Shivraj’s injury made front-page headlines in the Indian press, which described the dashing player as ‘polo’s poster boy’ and ‘one of India’s most eligible bachelors’.

‘Babji’, the maharajah, has received hundreds of messages of sympathy and support from friends throughout the international

HERBERT SPENCER

HERBERT SPENCER

Get well soon

L to r: Prince Charles, Carlos Gracida, Will Lucas, Christopher Hanbury, the Sultan, Prince Jefri, at an English charity match

of the game and review of the contemporary polo scene. 356 pages with 145 photographs and diagrams.

Published by J.A. Allen & Co. UK at £45.

The Royals At Polo Self-published work by well-known polo photographer Michael Chevis of Midhurst, West Sussex, with colour and black-and-white pictures, press clippings and profiles covering three generations of players from Britain’s royal family: the Duke of Edinburgh, Prince of Wales, Princes William and Prince Harry. Available from www.michaelchevis.com. £14.95.

polo community. Doctors have said Shivraj’s recovery has been slow. Three years ago the young prince, who played polo at Eton and Oxford, spent two months in hospital after a similar head injury.

Palermo chicos Fourteen year-old John Kent, son of former 8-goal international Alan, became the youngest English player to compete on the hallowed turf of La Victoria, No. 1 ground at Palermo in Buenos Aires. Players aged nine to 15 from seven countries got an unprecedented chance to show off their budding skills at Argentina’s national polo stadium in February. Jorge ‘Tolo’ Fernandez Ocampo’s Candelaria Junior International Tournament marked the first time that any competitors under 15 had played at the mecca of world polo, where upwards of 15,000 or more spectators jam the giant stands to watch teams of up to 40 goals in the Argentine Open.

The proud young players, girls and boys alike, were from Argentina, Peru, Uruguay, Mexico, Malaysia, France and England. The English contingent was the largest from overseas and included John Kent, Freddie Horne, Jack Mesquita, Tom Meyrick, Max Charlton and William Batchelor.

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Enforced absence

HERBERT SPENCER

England’s first high-goal patron from Eastern Europe is out for the 2005 season and maybe longer. Polish economist and financier Marek Dochnal broke onto the scene last year when he fielded his Larchmont team with veteran pro Piki Diaz Alberdi at Number 3. His investment firm Larchmont was also corporate sponsor of England’s premier mediumgoal tournament, the Royal Windsor, and Marek was at the Queen’s side when she presented the trophy at Guards Polo Club. Last autumn he was detained for investigation into bribery in Poland’s current big government corruption scandal.

Under Polish law, he can be held without charge for up to two years. While in detention in Warsaw, Marek (below, middle with wife Aleksandra and Piki) missed the birth of his second child in England.

ENGLAND: The world’s most cosmopolitan high goal season

L to r: David Jamison, chairman of Cowdray Park Polo Club, Francesca and Urs Schwarzenbach

TEAM PATRONS AND THEIR PROFESSIONAL players from a dozen countries are saddling up to do battle for some of the sport’s most coveted bits of gold and silver as the 2005 high goal season gets underway in May. Across the Atlantic, the vast majority of teams at the top end of the sport are fielded by Americans, and in Argentina by Argentines. The high goal season is far more international in England, where team patrons come from around the world to play, and perchance to win, at the font of modern polo.

England’s tournaments this year will again be the

Some likely teams Adolfo for Aiken American fans deprived of watching the ‘world’s best player’ during the big Florida season can head to Aiken, South Carolina in September to marvel at his talents. Argentine 10-goaler Adolfo Cambiaso was taken out of action for the winter high goal season by Eric Koch. The superstar was under contract to play private chukkas on Koch’s Jedi grounds just up the road from International Polo Club Palm Beach (shades of Brunei’s Prince Jefri who, in the Nineties, snatched all the 10goal Heguys from competition to play chukkas on his English estate!). Adolfo will be playing for Russ McCall’s New Bridge team in the 26-goal USPA Gold Cup in Aiken, where high goal polo is making a comeback.

Ashbert Raiders: Prince Asiri, Nigerian Atlantic: Adrian Kirby, English Azzurra: Stefano Marsaglia, Italian Black Bears: Urs Schwarzenbach, Swiss Buffalos: Jean François Decaux, French Cadenza: Tony Pidgley, English Dubai: Ali Albwardy, UAE Emerging: Fabian Pictet, Swiss Emlor: Spencer McCarthy, English FCT: Roger Carlsson, Swedish Geebung: Rick Stowe, Australian Laird: Richard Britten-Long, English Lechuza: Victor Vargas, Venezuelan Les Lions: Joe and Max Gottschalk, Swiss Loro Piana: Alfio Marchini, Italian Lovelocks: Charlie Hanbury, English Oaklands: Martyn Radcliffe, English Salkeld: Nick Clarke, English Talandracas: Edouard Carmingnac, French Typhoo: Lyndon Lea, English

world’s most cosmopolitan, with patrons from the home country, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Australia, Venezuela, Nigeria, and the United Arab Emirates making plans to compete at 22-goal level during the country’s 2005 season. More than 20 teams are expected to compete in one or more of the ‘big four’ contests.

There are several new sides entering the fray, including those of an increased number with English patrons.

The high goal season kicks off with the Prince of Wales Trophy at the Royal County of Berkshire Polo Club May 10-21, in which seven or eight teams are likely to compete. Next comes the Queens Cup at Guards Polo Club, May 24 to June 12, with at least 13 teams on the cards.

The Warwickshire Cup at Cirencester Park Polo Club, probably with six or more contestants, is scheduled for June 14-26.

The biggest prize of all, the Veuve Clicquot Gold Cup, will be played for during the British Open Championship at Cowdray Park Polo Club from June 25 to July 17. As many as 16 or more teams are expected to enter this 50th Open. Swiss patron Urs Schwartzenbach’s Black Bears is the only side in contention to have won the trophy twice, in 1992 and 2002.

Two teams are coming straight from competing in the 26-goal US Open in Florida: Italian Alfio Marchini’s Loro Piana and Venezuelan Victor Vargas’s Lechuza, a newcomer to the English high goal season. German patrons Joe Gottschalk and son Max are bringing Les Lions back after a high-goal hiatus. England’s Martyn Radcliffe, out last season due to injury, is returning with his Oaklands Park team. Also back after a year’s absence is Roger Carlsson’s FCT. A surprise change in line-ups this year is the replacement of 10-goal Lolo Castignola by 8-goal Piki Diaz Alberdi in Ali Albardi’s Dubai team, winner of the Gold Cup in 2001 and Queens in 2003. Lolo and his fellow 10, Adolfo Cambiaso, were a formidable duo, but Dubai was unexpectedly crushed 17-9 by Azzurra in last year’s British Open. Azzurra’s Italian patron, Stefano Marsaglia, is bringing his team back to defend the title.

Sadly, one great perennial will be missing: Labegorce, which took Queens last year and in 1995 and the 1997 Gold Cup. French patron Hubert Perrodo is taking a year out because of injury, so English fans won’t get to see his star player, 10goal Mexican-American Carlos Gracida, who has won the British Open a record 10 times.

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The best reason to come to the UK

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Cowdray Park ad.indd 1

3/5/05 3:15:26 pm

cover story It’s not just Sven Goran Eriksson who has trouble prising players away from their clubs for England duty. Polo has the same problem. But change is afoot and the national side’s profile could soon be riding higher than ever.

By Adam Edwards

Bachelor Boys hey say football is a funny old game. But try polo for a bit of a laugh. It’s the grandest sport in the world, offering the perfect profile for any luxury goods manufacturer worth its leather accessories and yet our national team has struggled to get major sponsorship. It draws large crowds at its home international, the Cartier, but half the audience has never heard of the players on the field, let alone understand the rules.

The British sport’s only world-famous players of whom anyone has heard, the Windsor princes, are unlikely to make the country’s national side, which anyway traditionally has one annual home fixture because the regular club polo schedule is so crowded.

And despite drawing more celebrities per square inch of turf than any other comparable game on the planet, the major television networks and most of our newspapers simply shun the sport.

Is this crazy, foolish or just bad luck? Certainly, all these anomalies mean that the general public has regarded our national polo side as an obscure gang of rich toffs watched by twits who are more interested in the Moët than the match. It also helps explain why for much of its life the English team has been to international polo what the United States soccer team is to international football – keen as mustard yet missing the beef. The competitive spirit in polo has been willing but the flesh has been under-trained and under-funded. But change is

T

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HORSE AND HOUND

Above: The Queen, watched by Cartier’s chief executive Arnaud Bamberger, presents Henry Brett with his medal at the 2004 Cartier International

MISSY BAILLIEU

Left: Ready for action, (l to r) Malcolm Borwick, Luke Tomlinson, Henry Brett and Mark Tomlinson shortly before taking on South Africa.

afoot. Firstly there is a group of beefy bachelor boys who have the potential to compete with the best in the world and, secondly, for the first time in its history two other vital ingredients are available – money and coaching. In the past, England has been supported by Berkeley Homes and Cadenza but now requires a full time sponsor. The cash has come from Audi (the first time England has had a full-time sponsor) and the coaching by John Horswell, acknowledged as the one of the best in the world.

What’s more, the HPA has announced that there will be two new test matches this year. The first is being organised by Cirencester Park and Beaufort clubs, with Argentina the likely opponents. The second is scheduled for September 3 at Cowdray Park against South Africa.

‘England has a national team of young riders who are about to be taken seriously. We have a group of players on the up,’ said Alan Kent, a member of the HPA’s international committee. ‘The England team is young and potentially the most exciting in years.’

The side is based around a small group with its hard core of Henry Brett as captain, Luke and Mark Tomlinson, James Beim and Malcolm Borwick. The squad currently claims a handicap of around 26. ‘If we can get to a handicap of 30 we can compete in the top three,’ said John Horswell, the Sven-Göran Eriksson of the England team without, he stresses, the extracurricular activities of the Swede. ‘If I can’t get two players to eight handicap and two to seven I’ll be very upset.’ Horswell is planning to turn his squad into a full-throttle professional sporting side. The current key players will be retained. But he envisages a permanent squad of seven or eight top-level players, plus a group of youngsters with five to seven goal handicaps Hurlingham 13

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Henry Brett (captain) Age: 30 Handicap: 7 Club: Royal County of Berkshire First Love (after polo): Steak, Labradors and beautiful women in equal measure Best Feature: Very cute, great eyelashes Status: single with serious girlfriend

said David Woodd, chief executive of the HPA, who is delighted with the prospect of a flowering England team. ‘You only have to see what has happened in rugby after our World Cup victory or see the influence of Tim Henman in tennis to realise the effect the very top players have on a game, from technique to press coverage.’

Meanwhile, the new team manager is Andrew Tucker. He was brought in last year with the specific aim of promoting the England team and organising its logistics – away matches, appearance fees and the team shirt (now sponsored by Crew clothing). But most importantly he has helped manage the new sponsor, Audi.

‘In the past, the international team has been an add-on to tournament polo,’ said Andrew, who is also an agent for the Tomlinson boys. ‘No-one’s really had the time or money to sort it out. But now we are investing in it, which is unique for the national side. We want to see the England team making the back pages of the national

HORSE AND HOUND

MISSY BAILLIEU

coming through. There is also a repeat of last year’s successful British Polo Championship (four fully professional teams with sponsors rather than patrons) and the Argentine Cup (an invitation day against a group of Argentine players with the same handicap as the England team) at Beaufort.

‘For the first time we have got some money with Audi coming in to support a three-year deal,’ said Horswell. ‘Key players will be put on retainers and I intend to start a totally innovative polo programme the like of which has never been done in this country before. We are going to organise training days and get-togethers to try and expand our knowledge in every area from diet to exercise. We are going to lecture the team and invest money in them.’

A resurgent national team is in everyone’s interest, not least as it is likely to make a huge difference to grass-roots polo. ‘Any national team that is successful helps sport in general,’

Race on: Mark Tomlinson, left, and Chile’s Alejandro Vial at the gallop Above left: Sugar Erskine, Malcolm Borwick and Mark Tomlinson at Kurland, December 2004

Luke Tomlinson

Mark Tomlinson

Age: 28 Handicap: 7 Club: Beaufort First Love (after polo): Hunting (was a protester in the House of Parliament) and everything to do with the countryside Best Feature: Elegant, charming with wonderful manners Status: Single

Age: 22 Handicap: 6 Club: Beaufort First Love (after polo): Getting a higher handicap than his brother Best Feature: His mind (he is currently reading Spanish literature at University of West of England) Status: Single

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press. And furthermore we are looking to use the England boys to take polo into other areas such as advertising and promotions.’

It would, however, be naive to imagine that success is just a chukka away.

The polo calendar is jam-packed and patrons who have paid to sponsor

international players may still be reluctant to see their skilled employees missing games in order to play for England.

‘Unfortunately, in polo the first call is to the patron and the second call is to England,’ said Alan Kent. ‘And I worry about the time available for training sessions – there has always

James Beim

Malcolm Borwick Age: 28 Handicap: 6 Club: Guards First Love (after polo): Cricket (he opened the batting at Radley with his chum, the now-England opener Andrew Strauss) Best Feature: Heir to estate in Perthshire Status: Single with serious girlfriend

Age: 23 Handicap: 6 Club: Cirencester First Love (after polo): Golf, rugby (his brother is a professional player) and pig farming Best Feature: Curious but wicked sense of humour Status: Single with girlfriend in Australia

been a problem getting all the players and their horses together at the height of the season. I’d love to see the team have enough money to spend the winter training in Argentina but that will only come when the sponsorship is big enough. But there is a lot more effort going into the England team. It is young and the prospects are exciting.’

Of course, you have to be realistic.

Even with the best squad in years, the best coach and proper sponsorship, the England polo team is unlikely to knock Becks (or Posh) from the front page or if it comes to that Wayne Rooney from the back. On the other hand, if, like me, you head off in a Panama hat and blazer to watch an international at Cirencester, at least one’s mates will no longer say ‘you’re having a laugh’.

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24-Jul

Cartier International Day at Smiths Lawn Coronation Cup: England v Australia Golden Jubilee Cup: Hurlingham v Princes of Wales’ Team

Guards

25-Jun 03-Sep

The Evolution Polo Test Match England v Argentina Test Match England v South Africa

Beaufort Cowdray

Start Date

End Date

10-May 24-May 16-Jun 29-Jun

Handicap

Location

21-May 12-Jun 26-Jun 17-Jul

Tournament High 22 Goal The Prince of Wales Trophy The Hildon Queen’s Cup Warwickshire Cup Cowdray Park Gold Cup - British Open

17-22 17-22 17-22 20-22

RCBPC Guards Cirencester Cowdray

03-May 05-Jul 12-Jul 26-Jul 16-Aug

20-May 10-Jul 16-Jul 31-Jul 28-Aug

High 18 Goal Indian Empire Shield The Apsley Cup The Duke of Beaufort’s Cup Cowdray Park Challenge Cup Duke of Wellington’s Trophy

15-18 15-18 15-18 15-18 15-18

Coworth Cirencester Beaufort Cowdray Guards

15-May 29-May 14-Jun

15-May 29-May 18-Jun

High Above 22 Goal Polo Masters Kuoni World Class Polo Cup The Argentine Club Cup

Open Open 22-28

Hurtwood Hurtwood Beaufort

26-Jul 01-Sep

31-Jul 04-Sep

BPE British Polo Championships Silver Jubilee Cup

20-24 20-24

Coworth Cowdray

24-May 29-May 20-Jun 05-Jul 19-Jul 02-Aug

05-Jun 19-Jun 03-Jul 23-Jul 30-Jul 14-Aug

Medium 15 Goal The Arthur Lucas Cup Royal Windsor Cup The Eduardo Moore Tournament Coworth Park Challenge Harrison Cup National 15 Goal Championship

12-15 12-15 12-15 12-15 12-15 12-15

Beaufort Guards RCBPC Coworth Cowdray Cirencester

18-May 24-May 18-Jun 28-Jun 16-Aug 27-Aug

22-May 05-Jun 26-Jun 17-Jul 28-Aug 11-Sep

Intermediate 12 Goal Dollar Cup RCBPC 12 Goal Challenge The Prince of Wales’ Cup The Queen Mother Trophy Cheltenham Cup Autumn Nations – Kerry Packer

8-12 8-12 8-12 8-12 8-12 10-12

Cowdray RCBPC Beaufort Cirencester Cirencester Guards

17-May 04-Jun 02-Jul 25-Jul 09-Aug

29-May 12-Jun 16-Jul 31-Jul 14-Aug

Low 8 Goal Gerald Balding Cup The Eduardo Rojas Lanusse Cup The Julian and Howard Hipwood Trophy Holden White Challenge Cup National 8 Goal Championships

4-8 4-8 4-8 4-8 Open/4-8

Cirencester Beaufort RCBPC Cowdray Cheshire

25-Jun 17-Jul 26-Jun 02-Jul 14-Aug

Other Young England Match John Cowdray Trophy SUPA National Senior Schools Tournament SUPA National Universities Tournament Pony Club Championships

Open Open Open Open Open

RCBPC Cowdray RLS Cirencester Cowdray

25-Jun 17-Jul 26-Jun 29-Jun 16 Hurlingham 12-Aug

16-17. Diary.indd Sec1:16

NINA VESTEY, BEST YOUNG PLAYER 2004

The 2005 Fixtures

3/5/05 3:17:38 pm

Clubs in England

Clubs in Ireland

Clubs in Wales

1. Guards Polo Club, Surrey 2. Ascot Park Polo Club, Surrey 3. Attridges (formerlyAshfields), Essex 4. Beaufort Polo Club, Gloucestershire 5. Beverley, East Yorkshire 6. Binfield Heath Polo Club, Oxon 7. Cambridge and Newmarket Polo Club, Cambridgeshire 8. Cheshire Polo Club, Cheshire 9. Cirencester Park Polo Club, Gloucestershire 10. Cowdray Park Polo Club, West Sussex 11. Coworth Park Polo Club, Berkshire 12. Edgeworth Polo Club, Gloucestershire 13. Epsom Polo Club, Surrey 14. FHM, West Sussex 15. Ham Polo Club, Surrey 16 Heathfield Park, Oxon 17. Hurtwood Park Polo Club, Surrey 18. Inglesham Polo Centre, Wiltshire 19. Kirtlington Park Polo Club, Oxon 20. Knepp Castle Polo Club, Sussex 21. Little Dragoons Polo Club, Norfolk 22. New Forest Polo Club, Hampshire 23. Orchard Polo Club, Dorset 24. Royal County of Berkshire Polo Club, Berkshire 25. Royal Leamington Spa, Warwickshire 26. RMA Sandhurst Polo Club, Surrey 27. Rugby Polo Club, Warwickshire 28. Rutland Polo Club, Leicestershire 29. Sussex Polo Club, West Sussex 30. Taunton Vale Polo Club, Somerset 31. Tidworth Polo Club, Hampshire 32. Toulston Polo Club, Yorkshire 33. West Somerset Polo Club, Somerset 34. West Wycombe Park Polo Club, Buckinghamshire 35. Woolmers Park Polo Club, Hertfordshire

36. All Ireland Polo Club, Dublin 37. Brannockstown Polo Club, Co Kildaire 38. Curraghmore Polo Club, Co Tipperary 39. Limerick, Co Limerick 40. Moyne Polo Club, Durrow 41. Northern Ireland Polo Club, Armagh 42. Waterford, Co Tipperary

45. Monmouthshire Polo Club, Lower Machen

Clubs in Scotland 43. Dundee and Perth Polo Club, Perthshire 44. Edinburgh Polo Club, Mid Lothian

For information on these clubs contact the Hurlingham Polo Association, Manor Farm, Little Coxwell, Faringdon, Oxon SN7 7LW Tel: 01367 242828 Fax: 01367 242829 Email: enquiries@hpa-polo.co.uk Website: www.hpa-polo.co.uk

43 44

41

32

36 37 39 40

5

8 42

38

28 24

45 33

12 9 4

30 23

25

21

27

16 35 19 6 34 22 11 18

7

3

1 2 31 26 15 13 14 17 29 10 20

Official supplier of umpiring clothing to the Hurlingham Polo Association and affiliated UK Clubs available from all good equestrian shops. www.puffa.com

Hurlingham 17

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first person

Crème de la

Cream I SUPPOSE IT WAS THE UNLIKELY combination of accidentally falling asleep in Lord Rothschild’s bed after a gig for the Duke of Edinburgh, and snapping the front axle of a Range Rover on a potholed track in a motor rally that got me into polo. The fact that these two incidents happened almost ten years apart has absolutely no bearing on my ability to hit a ball from a galloping pony or play the drums better than anyone – well, almost anyone – on earth.

The first happened back in my pre-Cream days when I was playing with Alexis Korner’s Blues Incorporated at a party organised in honour of an entire team of Argentinian polo players. We were playing wonderful music when a man jumped on stage tooting his hunting horn very out of tune. I wasn’t impressed. Others present recollect that I was, well, a little bit out of it and I dozed off on his lordship’s bed. But I can’t have been too out of it – the encounter with some of the world’s most famous high goal players must have triggered some subliminal urge in me to have a go at what I had always judged to be a sport for Hoorays. Of course, I couldn’t have been more wrong. Polo is a great leveller. It has a lot in common with football, but it took me the best part of another decade to discover this.

Up until then my only encounter with my four-legged friends had been confined to riding as a small child in my retired grandfather’s horse and cart around the streets of Knowstone in Devon.

The second incident, the one that put me in the saddle and fired up a lifelong passion for the sport that brought me a two-goal handicap at the age of 56, came in 1974 during the Argdungu Rally in West Africa.

I was living in Nigeria at the time, where I

had invested my life’s savings in a worldclass recording studio. How does a jazz and rock star end up here? Simple. Africa is the spiritual home of the drum. It may be a long way from my native Neasden in West London, but the odyssey was as natural as it was essential to my musical development.

Away from my studio – we’d just recorded Band On The Run for Paul McCartney and Wings – I had achieved a bit of a reputation as a rally driver. Indeed, Sideways Baker and his Dancing Range Rover were known to perform with the kind of uninhibited gusto otherwise reserved for my drum kit.

As I executed an unexpected 180 degree turn at a checkpoint on the first day of the rally, a voice yelled from somewhere inside the cloud of dust I had created: “Bloody Hell.

The way you drive you should play polo!”

The voice belonged to Colin Edwards, who was then best polo player in Nigeria, with a five-goal handicap. He was also extremely amusing, totally mad, and had friends in high places – as I was to discover over the next few days. Edwards had been brought up as one of the children of the Emir of Katsina, also an outstanding player. He spoke fluent Hausa with the exclusive royal accent. I was leading that rally on the final night stage when I became the only person to ever snap the front axle of a Range Rover. The backup vehicle mysteriously failed to materialise and my navigator and I were forced to spend the night stranded in the desert. The next morning we managed to borrow a couple of bicycles to take us to the nearest village, from where we got a ride on an African bus to Kano. We went to the Kano Club in search of Edwards and a more permanent form of transport.

If it hadn’t been for a broken axle on an African rally, Ginger Baker might never have discovered the joys of polo. Here, as he prepares for an historic reunion with Cream, the legendary drummer recalls the outrageous origins of his love for the sport

“Mr Edwards is not here,” the barman confided, “but he is driving a Range Rover and will be along in a few minutes.” And so he was.

A very battered and cathedral-shaped model, with no glass in any window, skidded to a halt in the car park in another cloud of African dust. This was our missing back-up vehicle which Colin had managed to roll in the desert the day before. The whole day that followed was an amazing experience and formed the start of a firm friendship.

At the time, in the early Seventies, I had a few worries on my mind. Things weren’t going well with the studio. I’d fallen out with my partner, who happened to be the regional Minister for Trade, and I had just survived a bust for arms and drugs. I’d also been arrested and put under armed guard at a business meeting. My whole investment, as it transpired, was doomed. Anyway, I flew

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PAUL HARRIS

down to Lagos, picked up a front axle, and flew back to Kano. By the time I had driven the 700 miles back to my studio, the proverbial had really hit the fan. The locks on the whole building – including those on my flat above it – had been changed. My ashen-faced and trembling sound engineer informed me that, thanks to my broken axle, I had missed a posse of armed police who had come to arrest me the day before. Just at that moment, two Nigerian police Peugeots with blue lights flashing tore up the single track leading to the studio There was nothing for it but to go for the bush. I heard gunfire and ricochets as I hurtled in the Range Rover through the six-foot high grass behind the studio, leapt the drainage ditch and landed hard on the main road. Fortunately, marksmanship was not their strong point and I was unscathed. I drove the 14 miles to Lagos at record speed and did another of my

signature 180s in Colin’s backyard. I felt that if there was anyone in Nigeria who could help me out of this crisis it was him – and I was right. We drove to Lagos Polo Club where he introduced me to Umaru Shinkafe, assistant commissioner of the Nigerian Special Branch and a fine player with a three-goal handicap.

Phone calls were made and for the moment, at least, my liberty was assured. But I had nowhere to live and spent the next few days at the club.

‘Right, Baker. It’s time you got on a horse,’ declared Colin after we had consumed several large Bacardi and Cokes. Without further ado, he led me outside to where two grooms were holding an Argy mare all tacked up and ready to go. I climbed on board. Colin adjusted the stirrups and put the reins in my hand. ‘Are you sitting comfortably?’ he asked. I nodded. The grooms let go and Colin produced a whip and

gave the mare’s backside a massive whack.

We were off at a full gallop, with me clinging on for dear life. The exercise track went right round the polo field and between all the stables.

Blimey! This horse was shifting! At one point we came up behind a groom riding at a hand canter and gave him an enormous bump. On and on we flew, out through the entrance gate, across the road, and back up to Colin’s stables where, thankfully, the mare stopped. She was home. My beard was on one side of my face and my sunglasses on the other but I was still on board – and Colin had won a lot of money on a side-bet.

‘Well, how was that, Baker?’ he beamed.

‘You never told me where to find the bloody brakes!’ I complained.

‘OK, Baker, report here for duty at 8am tomorrow!’ he ordered.

I spent the following days riding around Hurlingham 19

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and around the sand exercise area as Colin taught me how to use the brakes and the accelerator. On the morning of the tenth day he announced: ‘Right Baker, you’ll do. I’ve put you down for four chukkas this afternoon.’ A battered old polo hat and a pair of worn-out boots were produced, a stick was put in my hand and before I knew it I was on the field.

Something very extraordinary happened.

I swung the stick and actually hit the ball.

Cool! Then I fell off. I must have come off half a dozen times during my four chukkas and found that I was much better at falling off

than hitting the ball.

Polo had the same effect on me as when I first discovered I was a drummer at the age of 15. I sat in with the band and played the bollocks off their drummer. I thought: ‘Hello, this is something I can do.’ Later, I made my own drum kit out of Perspex. I bent the shells and shaped them over my mum’s gas stove and they were an integral part of my life for five years until 1966 and the formation of Cream, when I got my first Ludwig kit. You can’t make horses out of Perspex but relationships can be just as strong – as I learned during

those halcyon days at the Lagos Polo Club.

I remember Colin had a sick horse called Je T’aime that he used to refer to as ‘that bloody ballet dancer’. She was a chestnut Argy and the grooms were terrified of her. I volunteered to look after her and soon found that she responded to kindness. We became very close friends. To Colin’s amazement I successfully played her, and thus began my affair with difficult horses. Every weekend I’d get four chukkas on Je T’aime and three other crazies that Colin and Umaru, the police chief, didn’t like. I’d spend the rest

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LFI CAMERA PRESS/DAVID WHITE

Left: Ginger Baker (far left) in action on the polo field.

Above: Beating the drum with Cream and, below, the cover of Cream’s definitive album Disraeli Gears

of the afternoon umpiring. I always did this with an experienced umpire, one of whom was a certain Captain Arthur Douglas-Nugent, who was the British Military Attache at the time. The atmosphere on the polo field was one of total enjoyment and good sportsmanship. I had lost my Nigerian studio and with it my fortune but I had found a new passion that down the turbulent years that followed has grown rather than diminished. My life took me briefly back to Britain in 1976 where I was floored by a massive telephone-number tax bill and went broke. I lived in Italy before moving to California, taking my dogs and horses with me. I made my comeback on the polo field there, but my nine years in the sun were

blighted by immigration problems and I eventually moved to South Africa six years ago.

Polo in England is unique, unequalled anywhere else in the world, except perhaps Argentina. There are now two different games being played, “the English game” which is also played in Argentina, and the “American game”. I’m pleased the HPA hasn’t been influenced by America. The Hurlingham Polo Association has got it right and with the enormous amount of young players coming up through the pony clubs, England should overtake Argentina. The polo fraternity here in South Africa is, without a doubt, the most charming and hospitable on earth. But a typical tournament begins at 9am and continues until late afternoon with five or six games taking place each day on one field for three days. By the final day the field is totally destroyed and extremely dangerous.

Similarly, behaviour at practice chukkas is nothing short of disgraceful. They are approached like a major tournament: winning at all costs is the predominant aim. Players thunder around like headless chickens, senselessly whacking the ball in any direction, with bone-juddering bumps usually accompanied by a protruding elbow. The most basic and dangerous fouls occur frequently – as do angry disputes with the umpire. I have met in polo some of the coolest people. Conversely I have also met many, many absolute pricks. Polo is a gentleman’s game. I count myself extremely fortunate to have partaken in many gloriously enjoyable chukkas on four continents.

Leaving the ground with a permanent grin fixed on my face… not knowing, or even caring, what the score was. I have had enormous fun and stacked up a host of wonderful memories that will stay with me forever.

Despite the onset of debilitating osteoarthritis and the fact that I’m now 65 years old, I am building my very own Field of Dreams – a private polo field.

Here, I can invite my friends to come and play. I am creating a full-sized field where just one game of polo will be played no more than once a week.

This year finds me doing a little drumming out of Africa for a brief revival of Cream. At heart I am and always will be a jazz musician, but Cream was the culmination of a lot of hard work and study to form a popular band, playing good music and making some money. The reunion was Eric’s idea and should be a blast musically, but I’d just like to point out that I founded Cream and Eric is the first to admit it.

I’d like to be remembered for that, not as “Clapton’s drummer” – it’s very frustrating when people call me that. I’d like to be remembered as a drummer who was up there among the greats alongside Phil Seamen, Art Blakey, Philly Jo Jones, Elvin Jones and Max Roach. All five were my heroes when I was a kid and all became my close friends. But I’d also like to be remembered as a good – and always sporting – polo player.

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special report

Picking up the Can anything replace fox-hunting for the sheer thrill of the chase? Not really, says former master of foxhounds Rory Knight Bruce, but polo offers a gripping alternative and is ready to welcome newcomers

he bewilderment in the equestrian world which has arisen from the British government’s decision to ban fox-hunting has reverberated the length and breadth of the country. But such is the relationship between an Englishman – and woman – and his horse, that it will take more than a spiteful law to dampen its ardour.

While most hunts have now adapted to ‘line-hunting’, in other words hunting the drag of a fox, there is general agreement that this is not a satisfactory alternative to the ancient art of venery. At best, all

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it can offer is a fast gallop over open countryside. Yet what do hunters do now that the season has ended?

Certainly, some – those without farms needing attention – may use their hard-earned winter fitness to do battle with the slopes of Gstaad, Meribel and St Anton. ‘I thought you should know that a mountain elk has just crossed the slope in front of me,’ the renowned skiing writer Alisdair Scott telephoned to tell me recently. ‘I thought you would appreciate that as a hunter.’

While the sound on his mobile of sleigh bells, an aperitif being

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e reins

poured and gently falling snow briefly questioned my devotion to hunting after another cold and wet day, there is no question that for its practitioners, it is the ultimate challenging sport. So it is for those who play polo.

‘I don’t know which brings more tears to me eyes, to jump a big hedge out hunting or to win a polo tournament,’ says Anthony Fanshawe, 40, whose father Brian was a noted master and amateur huntsman and who has played high goal polo since he was 20.

There is increasing evidence that foxhunters are joining the 3,000

or so who are now playing polo across Britain. And it can’t have been mere coincidence that one of the eight who dared to enter the House of Commons in protest against the hunting ban, a keen polo player, Luke Tomlinson, is a member of the England national team.

The fact is that the hunting and polo seasons neatly dovetail into each other and there is evidence from the many polo grounds around the country that hunters, particularly younger ones, are prepared to give the summer and winter sport of polo a try. ‘Families have seen what might happen to hunting and are looking for similar thrills for Hurlingham 23

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their children in polo,’ says David Cowley, organiser of Pony Club Polo.

He points out that children can play polo on their ‘fluffy ponies’ and that events are organised so that you only need one horse up until the age of 18. ‘I found many likeminded parents when our children started. If I had seen a lot of smart horses it would have probably put me off,’ adds Cowley.

‘Lots of people who play polo also take their ponies out hunting,’ says James Norman, polo manager at the West Somerset Polo Club at Dulverton. Some even play polo on hunter ponies. To encourage new members the club has organised an open day each May when club members lend their ponies to interested beginners.

‘I would get off my horse in March and then not get on again until October,’ admits bloodstock agent, Charlie Gordon-Watson, 42, joint master of the Cottesmore foxhounds.

‘I simply did not know what to do with myself in the summer.’

His answer came three years ago in a telephone call from Lady Lloyd-Webber at Sydmonton Court in Hampshire. Had he ever thought of joining her Watership Down polo club? Gordon-Watson now has six polo ponies at Watership Down and says: ‘I am addicted to it.’ He practices three evenings a week, driving down from London, and plays in tournaments at the weekend.

Although Gordon-Watson only took up polo again recently, and is an intermediate player, he had gone to train under Hector Barrantes in Argentina when he left school.

‘I have done hunting, point-to-pointing, eventing and race-riding. But polo is the

Getting into the swing at Christy’s Riding School, Hampstead, in 1937

most exciting and the most dangerous of all of these. My advice to anyone thinking about it is to start as soon as you can.’

It’s a sentiment echoed by Kim Richardson, 47, joint master of the Crawley and Horsham foxhounds who founded the Knepp Castle Polo club in 1990. Like Gordon-Watson, Richardson learned to play under a gifted tutor, Lord Patrick Beresford, when he was stationed at Windsor in the army and played at Guards Polo Club.

‘I started playing polo at 17, the same time as I started whipping in to the foxhounds,’ he says. ‘I kept a couple of old thoroughbreds on the farm, made a bit of a pitch and took it from there.’

Today, Knepp Castle Polo Club has 110 playing members and is actively encouraging teenagers to play with adults. ‘Perhaps it’s because I’ve got teenagers but I think it is a better and less dangerous way to learn,’ says Richardson. ‘We are not flashy at Knepp.

We take the attitude that everyone has to work and we set most of our tournaments at weekends.’

Knepp has open days, along with many clubs across the country, and this year it’s hosting a charity day with a journalist in each team. Christopher Hanbury, chairman of the Hurlingham Polo Association, the sport’s ruling body, is keen that this should be encouraged. He owns the Longdole polo club at Birdlip in Gloucestershire, and has established a major polo training ground with a particular emphasis on teenagers. ‘As Churchill remarked, polo is a passport to the world,’ he says. At Longdole, where 85 schoolchildren a week come in the summer, pupils can rent a pony or bring their own. They are also encouraging students to spend their gap year in a polo environment in Argentina.

Robert Cudmore is Longdole’s polo manager, who began teaching in 1988. He gives one-on-one lessons (from £60 for an hour and a half ) to groups of eight (£35 for

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As Sir Winston Churchill remarked: ‘polo is a passport to the world’

an hour and a quarter). ‘Hunting gives our students balance and timing and both sports need to have guts,’ he says.

Not only is the Pony Club doing its bit to foster interest but so too is the Schools and Universities Polo Association (SUPA) under the chairmanship of Charles Betz, also a keen supporter of the Vale of Aylesbury foxhounds.

‘We are seeing a compound growth of 15 per cent a year in those under 22 taking up the sport,’ he says, citing the tremendous growth in polo among such schools as Eton, Harrow, Stowe and Roedean, and the standard of safety and teaching which has come into place. ‘There are now 500 children playing polo across the country each week of the academic year,” he says.

Claire Tomlinson, one of the three England team coaches, believes that polo is now enjoying a dramatic, worldwide surge in popularity. ‘But it is in England that I notice it most where anyone who has had a taste of polo wants to do more.’

She puts this down to the experience garnered at Pony Club and at army level, Take, for example, Captain Ian Farquhar, master and huntsman of the Beaufort foxhounds.

‘He once told me the only thing he would consider doing if he could not hunt hounds would be to play polo,’ she says.

And polo has never been more accessible.

While a polo pony may cost £8,000 if it is to turn left and right and stop with reasonable

efficiency, there are plenty of places where you can rent an already trained pony. At the West Somerset Polo Club it is possible to enter into a syndicate to keep costs down and ponies fit.

A lot of clubs are organising special training days. For example, three day courses at the Tidworth Polo Club, where several hunters have been to visit recently – including Tony Holdsworth, kennel huntsman to the Beaufort – cost from £510 for a non-residential course.

‘We aim to have everyone playing to a certain level by the end of the course,’ says Muriel Osborne for the club. ‘For those foxhunters who have worn their years lightly, there is no restriction in age for starting. ‘It’s how confident you feel on a horse.’

What all who hunt and play polo agree upon is that if you have hunted for several seasons it will give you a head start on the polo ground. This is certainly the view of Christine, Lady de la Rue, former master of the Berwickshire foxhounds in Scotland (and currently of the Border Bloodhounds) and owner of Ayton Castle and its two polo grounds.

Starting in her 40s from a hunting background, Lady de la Rue now takes part in as many as 12 tournaments a season.

‘You need the ability of a circus rider with a

Above left: Prince Edward lends support to polo pony club.

Above: a gathering of the House of Commons protesters

jumping seat,’ she says. ‘The horses have got to be very athletic as have the riders. This shouldn’t be a problem for hunters.’

The relationship between hunting and polo has never been stronger. ‘All our local players hunt,’ says Claire Tomlinson, who with her husband Simon also runs the Beaufort Polo Club to which both Prince William and Prince Harry belong. ‘We still have inter-hunt polo matches with the nearby Bicester hunt and they are always great events.’

Me? I am a lifelong foxhunter. Now, as I embark on learning to play polo, I look forward to the day, if it ever comes, when I can say that winning a game or whacking the ball between the goalposts is every bit as eye-watering as jumping a big hedge – and living to tell the tale.

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tribute

Ten-goal man He was one of the greatest players Argentina has ever produced – and the finest of human beings. Long-time friend Alberto P Heguy pays his respects to Gonzalo Tanoira

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he polo community was left stunned on Friday 17th December 2004 when Gonzalo Tanoira, president of the Argentine Polo Association (AAP), tragically died in the Mater Dei hospital in Buenos Aires after suffering a heart attack during a routine back operation.

Son of Susana Graziosi and Doctor Jorge Tanoira, Gonzalo was married to architect Lusita Miguens and was father to Gonzalo, Javier, Bárbara, Leonor and Santiago.

As a player Gonzalo reached the maximum 10 goal rating in 1969 and is regarded as one of the alltime greats of Argentine polo. Yet despite his undisputed talent, he never won the Argentine Open.

In May 2005, Gonzalo would have completed his term as President of the AAP, a reign that had at times been controversial, but one that ended with the most exciting Argentine Open in years.

Seventeen-time Argentine Open winner Alberto P Heguy, father to three of the Indios Chapaleufu II team that won the 2004 Open, and rival and longtime friend of Gonzalo Tanoira, here pays tribute to the life of the late AAP President.

Gonzalo and I knew each other for years and the one underlying feeling between us was the respect that we had for one another and the respect everyone in polo had for him.

That is something very difficult to accomplish in this sport.

On the field Gonzalo was probably the greatest player

never to win the Argentine Open. And I have to admit that he was better than me, even though I won the tournament 17 times.

This was a cultured, intelligent and reasonable man who seemed much more knowledgeable about the world in general than most and who happened to be the second-best player of his generation.

I can say with absolute certainty that the only man better on a polo field than Gonzalo Tanoira in our era was Juan Carlos Harriot.

Perhaps that was because Gonzalo did not risk everything on the field, like some of us did. He lacked that crazy spark which pushed us over the edge and beyond. But instead he was a hugely talented, technical, neat and precise player who played with total control who did not need to risk his life every time he played.

When our old Coronel Suárez team was considered practically unbeatable, people thought he should have joined the Santa Ana team so that they could mount a Above: serious challenge against us.

Playing at Oak I guess the romantic in me Brook World says that instead of choosing Cup outside Chicago, 1977. to play for Santa Ana, Left: his last Gonzalo preferred to keep picture, playing with his friends for December 2004, his Mar del Plata team. presenting The reality of it is that trophies to children at La he probably preferred to Candelaria Polo continue playing good Club, Argentina polo with Mar del Plata,

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irrespective of the results. Either way, it shows the type of man he was. He overlooked a word which so many other sportsmen craved and placed so much importance on – winning.

We played against one another on numerous occasions, but, irrespective of who won, we would always go out and celebrate together.

And the times that we did play on the same team – in various exhibition matches, in the 1977 World Cup in the United States, or in the third match of the Americas Cup in San Antonio, Texas – I can be one hundred percent sure, without any shadow of a doubt, that we never lost a game.

In the 1977 World Cup in Chicago, when we won the tournament for Chapaleufu, I remember saying to the team that if the rest of us did our jobs, he would win the game for us. That is not to say that we were not good, but it was a case of recognising that if his team-mates grafted for the side, he had enough ability to define games.

I remember being overcome by emotion that only 10 days before his operation the two of us were asked to play in a veterans game in which Gonzalo once again pulled out of the bag his impeccable timing of the ball and his precise hitting technique. Once again we came out on top and recorded a win as we used to do in the past.

Gonzalo was a special player from whom

others learned a great deal. And as a horse breeder Gonzalo was second to none. From a good starting base, he would produce really high-quality product in small quantities. He was also a fine businessman and managed to do well from his breed.

Off the field, Gonzalo, like any of us, made mistakes and there were times when people did not agree with his policies, particularly when dealing with Indios Chapaleufu teams as President of the AAP. We (the Heguys) felt hard-done-by at times. But no matter what his decisions were, people always had respect for him.

There is no disputing that the 2004 Open was excellent. This was a tribute to Gonzalo.

I do not say this because my sons won the competition. I say it because the games all showed how polo should be played and the 2004 Abierto will be remembered because of him. For a man who never won the tournament, he knew how to make it into a brilliant spectacle.

On a lighter note, I remember years ago when Gonzalo danced with Grace Kelly in Monaco. She was a princess and he was probably the best looking polo player in the world. But I remember him telling me that that kind of thing didn’t interest him too much. He was too downto-earth to be affected by that.

On and off the field, people admired him.

Gonzalo will be greatly missed by everyone in the polo world.

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He overlooked a word that so many other sportsman craved and placed so much importance on – winning

The Cowdray Park Gold Cup, 1966 won by Windsor Park. Centre front: Archie David.

Gonzalo Tanoira is fourth from right next to the Duke of Edinburgh

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foreign affairs

Calypso kings in a spin Once the powerhouse of the game, West Indian cricket has been hit for six. With a World Cup looming in the Caribbean, can the sport’s governing bodies arrest the decline before it’s too late? Henry Blofeld reports he light is fading but play continues. It’s a humid Sunday evening on a plot of public land just outside the Antiguan village of Urlings and two youngsters are at the crease. In the field, close to the bat, are mothers, grandfathers, aunts and uncles. A teenager is at mid-wicket and a toddler is looking lively in the covers. What a glorious scene – especially to those of us who know that cricket is more than just a game.

But scratch the surface and all is not well. Indeed, the outlook for West Indies cricket has never seemed bleaker. After ruling the world in the 1970s and 1980s, they have since been paying the penalty for thinking that their success would continue indefinitely. Those in charge ignored the need to look to the future and nurture new talent. When old age finally caught up with the side Clive Lloyd passed down to Viv Richards they had not brought on nearly enough top-quality players.

Today, there is a danger that West Indies cricket may disintegrate completely.

Defeat has become commonplace. Worse still, the reputation of West Indies cricket has suffered because of one badly flawed genius, Brian Lara. As the principal player it would have been impossible to deny Lara the captaincy. But he has now had two shots at the job and

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1970s watches A full house in the rule the world et ck cri n West India

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Viv Richa rds sets during his off on another run brilliant ca reer

Cricket is how the West Indies can stand shoulder to shoulder with the rest of the world

has shown that he is not up to it, neither tactically on the field or strategically off it. He appears to make little effort to understand those under him and is too self-obsessed for his own good or that of the team. If a side is to win test matches consistently, discipline is crucial.

Last winter, in Australia, the reputation of the West Indies sank to an all-time low, as they joined their hosts and Pakistan in the annual one-day triangular tournament.

Not only did the West Indies fail to qualify for the best-ofthree finals, but their behaviour off the field was so awful that the representative of their new sponsor, Digicel, felt forced to write to his employers in disgust. Apparently the players had been busier chasing the ladies in night clubs than victories on the field. More recently, the side was split asunder when Lara and other stars – sponsored by a rival telecommunications firm – were dropped for the home tests against South Africa in another sad indictment of the current sorry state of affairs.

Now, with the next World Cup being held in the West Indies in 2007, it will be a mammoth undertaking for this beautiful but splintered part of the world to run the competition efficiently.

One of the main problems is that the West Indies is only a generic name for purposes of cricket. The cricketing West Indies is made up of a large number of small independent nations all of which are understandably keen to look after their own interests.

Another perennial problem is the proximity of the United States. The Caribbean islands are deluged by American television channels. Young West Indians have the chance to watch baseball, basket ball, volley ball, American football and every other sort of ball in the USA. They realise the stars in these sports earn a good deal more than those who reach the top in cricket.

Nonetheless, American sport does not pose quite the threat to cricket that outsiders may imagine. The great Viv Richards is cautiously optimistic. ‘When you take the manner in which we won that one-dayer at the Oval last September, you can see that there is plenty of ability about,’ he told me. ‘What we need is consistency to go with this ability. The players need to be disciplined and this is the coach’s job. The players have got to get the hard yakka done. They must do the basics well. Yes, in the long term I think it’ll be all right but just at the moment I have a resigned feeling.’

Steve Camacho, the former West Indian opening batsman who was until recently the chief executive of the West Indies Board of Control, is more bullish. ‘Cricket is still the major televised sport in the Caribbean. The youngsters are not really going for the American sports.

The crowds have not gone away in spite of the results and have been as good for test as for one-day cricket. The real problem is that those in control have to bring the discipline back. From the moment that Lara and one or two other members of the team defied the board over money for the South African tour six years ago, it has got worse. I only Hurlingham 29

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TOM SHAW/GETTY IMAGES

ramshackle but friendly and welcoming. One, just to the right of the old wooden pavilion was the home of that most colourful Antiguan character, Gravy. He would wear extravagantly colourful clothes and while the cricket was in progress, he would sing and dance to the music played by his partner in arms, Chicky. Gravy would climb over the front of the stand and, hanging onto the railings, get up to all manner of antics to the great delight and amusement of the crowd.

Of course it will be sad to leave all this behind, but more sensible to regard the building of a bigger, more modern ground a few miles away to the east Play continues at the Recreation Ground in Antigua before making way as important progress. The for a new stadium a few miles down the road crowd capacity will be larger; there will be more space hope the new Australian coach, Bennett King, was just over the for advertisements; better who ran the Australian Academy, will be a road where Viv facilities for television, the Brian Lara ball heads watches as the major influence for good.’

Richards’s father life’s blood of contemporary for the bo undary Cricket is still, by some distance, the most was once an cricket; and a more streamlined popular game in the Caribbean and is truly officer. For years groundstaff even if there will be a national sport. It is seen as the one activity the prisoners helped the groundstaff with less need to worry about the where the West Indians can stand shoulder to the heavy roller. When the pitch was rolled immediate past records of those pulling the shoulder with everyone else in the world. For on the first morning of a test match, two or heavy roller. The new ground will be named, peoples who are desperately seeking their own three prison warders were allowed out onto appropriately enough, the Viv Richards identities, the importance of this should not the middle. The lucky inmates who had been Stadium, and it should generate enough be underestimated. given the chance of a brief look at the outside money to enable these new facilities to be kept The eyes of more than just cricket will be world were not just minor criminals. There up to standard. A cricket ground, like those upon the West Indies in 2007. In an ideal could well have been a convicted murderer or polo grounds at Smith’s Lawn, Cowdray Park world it would be wonderful if they could two lending a hand. and the rest, cost a lot to maintain. not only produce the best of World Cups in Viv Richards, the island’s greatest son, The stands at the Recreation Ground, terms of logistics and organisation, but also which will now be used for football, are rather is realistic about the new stadium. ‘A lot of a side at least capable of competing at the people will have a sentimental thing about highest level. the Recreation Ground,’ he said. ‘I shall miss This World Cup is going to bring about a it. Dad worked on the wicket and knows the number of changes. Tiny grounds filled by ground well. We’ll all miss Gravy, but he’s spectators who take home a small per capita retired anyway. Then, capacity comes into play income have always been a problem. The lure and, man, sentiment mustn’t get in the way. of the World Cup has persuaded the Antiguan The more people who see the game, the more authorities of the need for a newer and bigger interest is created.’ ground, the money for what will be a multiThe governing bodies of cricket in the purpose stadium being provided largely by West Indies have a huge task. Indeed, it China, of all places. No, the Chinese is the mandarins of most sports have not taken a sudden interest in – whether it be rugby or polo – who cricket, but deviously are keen to win are forced to grasp their respective the votes of the West Indian countries nettles in making hard decisions, inside the United Nations. and looking forward not backwards.

Diehard traditionalists will rue the Most important, it means fostering moving on from the romantic old the talent which undoubtably is still Recreation Ground, which first saw there. Yes, Brian Lara needed to be test cricket in 1981 and has produced put out to grass but, in addition, greats including Andy Roberts, Curtley those two lads running between the Ambrose and Richie Richardson. It wickets on a cabbage patch of a pitch had an intimacy which lent its own on a Sunday evening in Antigua character to West Indies and Leewards need to know that one day they Islands cricket. could be ruling the cricketing world There was the island’s prison which Viv Richards plays it straight on the snooker table once again.

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It’s the mandarins of all sports who must grasp their respective nettles

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adventure

The ride of my life

PAUL LANDRY

Thundering along at breakneck speed, risking life and limb in pursuit of glory – polo players know all about danger. But what happens when your goal is to cross Antarctica? Alastair Vere Nicoll relives his Boy’s Own story

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eing a polar explorer and playing polo have little in common other than a shared first syllable. Inspect them more closely, though, and there are several common strands: they are both heinously expensive, more than a little dangerous, are pursued by a small coterie of the clinically insane and can easily become an overriding obsession.

Some say that you don’t play polo – you have it, like polio.

It’s hard to get rid of, it consumes you. Captain Robert Scott, Sir Ernest Shackleton and Roald Amundsen – the preeminent of the golden age of Antarctic explorers – would have said the same about the ice. Once they had witnessed the magnetic allure of the Pole, they were doomed forever to return and were never truly happy in civilisation again.

For those who have played polo, no other sport, no other adrenalin rush, comes close.

Kicking the polo-habit a few years ago, after it had burned a hole in my pocket too big to sew up, meant there was a cold-turkey urge to replace it with something else.

And, so, I developed a passion to go to Antarctica.

As the desire to go to the remotest, windiest, highest and coldest continent on earth burgeoned, a few other factors conspired to lead me to a decision to leave my job as a cityboy and spend the next two years fund-raising for a recordbreaking attempt to traverse the Antarctic continent by ski and kite-surf. A close friend, Alex Roberts-Miller had died in a senseless tragedy and I met the charismatic Patrick Woodhead, 29, who had recently returned from the South Pole and who inspired me with a wealth of tales, footage, photographs and enthusiasm.

Soon, Patrick and I had formulated a truly madcap plan, including strands from the adventures of both Amundsen and Shackleton, that was dedicated to the memory of Alex.

Two teams would approach the South Pole from either side of the continent. One team would ski, hauling its loads, following the route of Amundsen – untravelled in the 94 years since he became the first man to stand at the South Pole – and once at the Pole would use the prevailing North wind to kite-surf back. The second team would drive to the Pole in specially modified Land Rovers, resupply the skiteam there, and then film its audacious kiting return.

As time progressed and Patrick and I had started to build up an impressive list of sponsors, including Invesco Perpetual, Dunhill and Nikon, we turned our attention to putting together a team that would be able to withstand

Previous page: Alastair Vere Nicoll treks towards the South Pole from the New Zealand side

the rigours of the expedition but still do it with panache and humour.

Who would be willing to race at adrenalin-pumping speed over a pock-marked surface and risk life and limb if they hit the ground? Well, there was no question – it had to be a polo player.

So we approached David de Rothschild, a friend of Patrick’s sister. David had played polo for a number of years, is Jack Kidd’s best friend and now breeds and trains polo ponies from his home in Hertfordshire. He leapt at the chance. What a shame he wasn’t our patron too.

Polo teams have four players. The formation is invariable; first a goal-hungry Number One. As the founder of the project and hungry for the success of the team but without the experience and skill of the other guys, this became my position in our polar line up.

Patrick, with his past Antarctic experience, dynamism, skill and carrying a large portion of the workload, would suit the harrying and manoeuvring of a Number Two. David is a giant of a man. Six foot five and 100 kilos. He

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PAUL LANDRY

has an incredible sense of humour and is ever-dependable.

Given he spends much of his time in New Zealand, he reminded me of a rangy Cody Forsyth. Number Four.

All that was left was to find Carlos Gracida. We needed a play-maker, someone with experience, age and common-sense to rein in our young team. If we were to pull off one of the most ambitious polar expeditions of recent times, we required a ten-goaler, someone of serious quality, the most accomplished polar explorer in the world: Paul Landry, 49. He’s the sort of player who arrives at a polo game in a helicopter, not a fast car. We’d have to pay big bucks to secure him for the season. We already knew of another team wanting his services. With him as our Number Three, we couldn’t lose. He could do things in that white landscape that no one else could.

He’d been to the North Pole three times and the South Pole twice, had lived in the high Arctic, ran Canadian eskimo dogs for a living and had a face as ravaged and time-worn as Kerry Packer’s.

The wives and husbands of polo-players aren’t always

Patrick Woodhead is transported through a blizzard by winds of up to 30 knots. His sledge weighed almost 200 pounds

tolerant of the pursuits of their other halves. They are forced to look glamorous on the sidelines, have to watch the lucre leach away into the bottom of a horse’s oat-trough and endure a constant diet of cucumber sandwiches and champagne without the camaraderie of the team or the adulation and attention. Perhaps they even feel, at times, as if polo might even be more important than they are.

Well, my wife, Annabel, can certainly sympathise.

Our baby was due on January 15, 2005 – the precise date that, if everything went smoothly, our expedition was scheduled to return from the ice. Oh Lord. To go or not to go? Could I bear to watch, emasculated, from the clubhouse, while another eager two-goaler rode my horses, profited from all my hard work and played in the ultimate high-goal tournament? Could I bear to miss the birth? If I obsessed too much about a silly, ego-centric, male-dominated pursuit maybe my wife would resent me forever. It had to be Annabel’s decision. At 31, I don’t think she expected I’d be going through my mid-life crisis so early. In the end, she decided, that I’d be more insufferable Hurlingham 35

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PATRICK WOODHEAD

LINDSAY YOUNG

Above (l to r): if I stayed behind than if I went. Good girl.

Alastair, Paul The game itself was a high-drama, eight Landry and chukka (plus extra-time) knuckle-biter worthy David de of the Argentine Open. The opposition – Rothschild.

Antarctica – was high quality. We arrived on Right: David November 1, 2004 – on windswept blue ice, prepares for in a cargo plane chartered from Kazakhstan polo action in warmer climes and flown by a battle-hardened team who had flown together in the Soviet army and the spectre of who celebrated each successful landing with a h u m i l i a t i n g bottle of vodka. We were greeted by the worst withdrawal firmly weather for 15 years. Stuck for a fortnight in the face. on the ice before we could even start the We were tired, injured and very much traverse, soft snow piled onto the usually hard behind time with our rations. Temperatures landscape. My hopes of returning for the birth of around minus 35 (without wind-chill) faded. Antarctica 1 us, 0. and severe headwinds further pressed us into We came out for the second chukka in a our own goalmouth. We now heard that the more determined mood and managed to take Land Rover team and film crew, over on advantage of clearer weather to fly across the the other side of Antarctica, had got stuck continent to the Ross Ice Shelf on the New in the unseasonally deep snow and were Zealand side and commenced our expedition being evacuated. So, with no rations being by climbing Mount Betty, finding on the brought to the South Pole, we had no hope summit a cairn built 94 years earlier by Roald of completing the journey. Our team was Amundsen. Scores level. down and almost out.

Over the next 20 days we heaved, pulled, At our most debilitated and having run tugged and sweated our way up the Axel out of funds, we had to negotiate for an Heiberg glacier – the first men to do so airdrop to bring the rations that were going without dogs – pulling our loads with two to be brought by the Land Rovers to the men per sled, so deep was the snow, and then South Pole. I managed to stave off infection returning in our tracks to lug up the second one.

Father and child reunion: Alastair The huge Amundsen Icefall, and his daughter, a tumbling frozen cataract Lily of ice, blocked our path. We zig-zagged through a maze of massive crevasses. Finally, at the top of the glacier and wheezing from the altitude, we got stuck in a blizzard of over 80km per hour for three days. David, who hurt his knee on the icefall, was threatened with evacuation. The very next day I got bad frostbite on my foot. It was my turn to face substitution. David and I looked

in my frostbitten hoof. David’s knee, without the hard climbing of the glacier, started to improve. The bitter wind dropped a few knots and now, at an altitude above the South Pole, we started to fight back. We finally arrived at the South Pole 52 days after arriving in Antarctica (and 37 days after starting the expedition).

It was now time to reveal our secret weapon – huge, powerful, bucking kites. They were the equivalent, for our beleaguered team, of getting onto steroid-pumped bronco horses. Provided we could stay on (and we frequently didn’t) they could propel us ahead at phenomenal speed. In polo, you are frequently required to hold four reins and a whip in a single hand.

Now we had many hundreds of kite-lines all converging, designed especially by Flexifoil to hold the polar winds – the strongest in the world.

So far we had made only 600 kilometres but now, wind-assisted, we charged forward, kiting whenever the wind was good, night or day, and made the remaining 1,100 klicks in only 18 days. There were many tussles with the sastrugi, blizzards, ice and crevasses of our opposition, including a very scary episode where David was left hanging from his armpits over a bottomless blue-ice abyss,.

But, eventually, we reached the end of the continent, to claim the match, at 11.30 GMT on January 12, 2005.

We became the quickest team to trek from the edge of Antarctica to the South Pole and the first to follow Amundsen’s route. We were also the fastest to traverse the continent and the first to do it from the New Zealand side.

David, at the age of 26, became the youngest Briton and Paul the first Canadian to traverse Antarctica.

I still had one amazing experience in store, though. The most surreal, gut-wrenching, happy-sad moment of my life.

Half an hour after completing our traverse, I called on satellite phone to the operating theatre of the Kingsbury hospital and listened to my incredible wife give birth to our daughter, Lily, and heard her screams for the first time from my tent on the sea-ice, miles from anywhere. Gutted not to be there, all the emotions of the last 76 days on the ice, the strain of the last two and a half years of planning and the joy of fatherhood all flooded out of me.

Who said polo players don’t cry? Some things are simply more important than sport.

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travel When the elephant polo season begins in Thailand, the players know where to calm their nerves and soothe their senses.

Sophie Campbell samples some luxury grooming

articipants in the King’s Cup Elephant Polo Tournament at Hua Hin, Thailand, will start making their way in late August to the venue near the Gulf coast, on the other side of the country from the tsunami-ravaged Indian Ocean beaches.

After a 12-hour journey and a welcome banquet at their luxury resort, they will spend a week acclimatising to monsoon conditions before play begins on September 5. And that’s just the elephants. The players – an eccentric melange of celebrities, army officers, ex-pats, Bangkok ladyboys and international daredevils – will be doing almost exactly the same thing, fanning out to the numerous top-level spas around Hua Hin. The difference, I reflected, while lying face down on a snowy towel and gazing deeply into a beaten brass bowl of floating jasmine petals provided by one such billet – the Evason Hideaway & Six Senses Spa – is that the elephants only get a hose-down.

While they tuck into bales of sugar cane, corn cobs, sticky rice and molasses served by their elephant-handlers, or ‘mahouts’, anyone staying at the Evason will, like me, pick at Thai delicacies, fragrant with galanggal, lemon grass and killer chillis, all served by a personal butler. Sleep will come not while attached to a stake under a shady tree but on high thread-count sheets, in subtle air-conditioning, under the gentle flutter of mosquito netting. Not for the first time in my life, I am glad that I am not an elephant.

The Evason Hideaway is less than a year old; one of the latest additions to the Six Senses portfolio of hotels owned by Sonu and Eva Shivdesani (their most famous property being Soneva Fushi in the Maldives, with new ones appearing all the time). They

P

The herd i like to keep one eye on luxury, the other on the environment: the 400 ponds and pools in the grounds are stocked with guppies to eat the mosquito larvae; swimming pools are saline, rather than chlorinated; table flowers are fallen, rather than picked, and the restaurants emphasise Thai, rather than imported, ingredients.

I arrived after a long flight and was greeted by an in-room Jet Lag Recovery Massage.

Not in my room, you understand, but in my spare room, the one just across the lily pond and in front of the 12-metre private pool, a trunk’s length from the sunken outdoor

sitting area and opposite my personal outdoor massage pavilion. It was exquisite.

Low lights. Thai whale music. And I had a charming, softly spoken therapist called Pu, with hands of supple steel which unravelled intra-muscular knots like knitting. It is also extraordinarily private. If, for some reason, you wished to set eyes on no other guests for your entire stay, that would be entirely possible. Every villa has its own pool - not all have two separate rooms, but some have little gardens leading down to a large pond and others are duplexes with outdoor terraces.

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the only host, due to political problems in Nepal and the effects of the tsunami in Sri Lanka).

During the week of the tournament, teams of between three and six players are tied on to their elephants for matches. They depend on the mahout, sitting behind the elephant’s head, to steer. A polo elephant can reach a speed of 15mph (25kph), with the collision-potential of two small lorries, and the field is a third of the conventional size. Past players include the Duke of Argyll and various members of the New Zealand All Blacks.

Those staying at the Evason Hideaway will be able to soothe away their elephantine injuries (which last year included a crushed toe and extensive bruising from being sat on) with massages, facials and after-sun care. Guests can enjoy all sorts of other treats, from in-villa pool parties (with your own chef or barbecue) to cookery and yoga lessons. This is just as well, because Hua Hin – though famous as a royal watering hole, rather like Bangkok’s Brighton – is not endowed with spectacular natural allure.

On a coastal plain edged with mangroves and white sand, coconut palms wave elegantly enough on its fringes, but the interior is flat, hectic with shrimp farms and pineapple plantations.

d instinct For elephant polo players, it is the perfect escape – a mere 20-minute drive from the polo ground at Suriyothai Military Camp, where the elephants travelling down from Chiang Mai in the north are lodged in the cool of the forest. It is here that monks open the seven-day tournament with a blessing and an elephant feast.

Elephant polo is 23 years old this year. It all began at Tiger Tops, the famous hotel on the grassy plains of Nepal, and soon became an annual event. Later, tournaments were held in Galle in Sri Lanka in 2001 and Hua Hin shortly afterwards (sadly this year Thailand is

Above: Playing in the rain – action from the King’s Cup Tournament.

Above right: the dramatic entrance to the Aveson Hideaway Hua Hin

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The town itself is a beneficiary of the spa boom – being within easy scampering distance of Bangkok – and lying parallel to the coast as a long, bustling place with a night market (fake bags, wraparound linen trousers, dresses, children’s clothes, electronics and cheap CDs and DVDs). The Royal Palace takes up an entire block, on one side of which stands a gigantic, gold-framed portrait of King Bhumipol and his queen.

So closeted are you in the confines of the Hideaway, with its maze of paths and secretive villas, that it is a shock to emerge into the real world. I elected to sail down to the mouth of the Praknam River on a junk, in the safe knowledge that with a large crew plus champagne and canapés served on a shady deck, it wouldn’t be too real world.

We drove for 20 minutes through the flattish landscape with its abrupt hills of red earth and foliage, past rows of pineapples in fields lined with plastic bags on sticks to scare the birds. Acacia trees and hibiscus bushes exploded with red and yellow blooms. Yet the port was not a marina filled with leisure craft and gin palaces. Far from it. It was a busy, working place, lined with big fishing boats tip-tilted at either end like bananas, with cabins divided into three cramped levels.

‘Most of the crew live on board,’ explained the captain of our boat, the June Bahtha Jonque. ‘Many of them are Burmese working here in Thailand to make money to send home. The captains are nearly always Thai’. Sure enough, families busied themselves about the decks, occasionally raising a hand as we passed. Three little boys fished off the back of one boat. The smell of drying squid, laid out on the river banks in the sun, lent a certain piquancy to the champagne.

Once we got to the river mouth, the sailors put up the asymmetrical sails of the junk and we billowed silently past a row of shrimp boats, lined up for a night’s work in the gulf, and past the buoy banning anyone from entering the King’s private holiday bay. The net result of all this activity was, obviously, exhaustion. An early night was called for. In the morning, woken by a tap on my outer door and the tinkle of cutlery and glass, I staggered out to find breakfast laid out on my poolside table – fresh guava juice, fresh pomelo, pineapple and papaya, boiled eggs and multigrain toast soldiers – and a small

If you wish to set eyes on no other guest for your entire stay, that is entirely possible

team of ladies preparing the outdoor massage pavilion for my holistic massage. I closed my eyes and lay on my back, opening them only when the cool cotton pads were removed to admire the ceiling of dried teak leaves and the cheeky mynah bird on the wall, clearly hoping that some of the essential unguents might be edible.

The masseuse set to work, restoring life back into legs enfeebled by days of total inactivity, gingering up my lymphatic system, halting the general facial downslide.

Meanwhile, I tried to imagine what an elephant polo player might need doing – mallet arm, perhaps, after wielding a stick more than two-metres long to hit a ball, or rope burns from being tied onto the elephant as it lumbers along – but soon gave up. It was far too tiring to think about.

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How to get there ITC Classics (01244 355527; www.itcclassics.co.uk) offers seven nights at the Evason Hideaway Hua Hin, staying in a Hideaway Villa, from £1,175 per person, room only, based on two sharing. This includes return economy flights with British Airways (Club World upgrade supplement from £1,000 pp each way) and all transfers.

Treatments at the Six Senses Spa range from a 50minute Indian Head Massage (£21) to a 90-minute Sensory Spa Journey (£110). An 80-minute Jet Lag Recovery massage costs £41.

For information about elephant polo, visit www.thaielepolo.com

Scotland’s Chivas Regal team celebrates becoming runner-up in the King’s Cup elephant polo tournament

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Chantilly chic ifteen minutes drive up the busy A1 autoroute from Charles De Gaulle airport, north of Paris, you can break away from the roaring traffic and take a quieter, more scenic route to France’s famous ‘Capitol of the Horse’, Chantilly. ‘Horses Crossing’ warning signs are the first indications that this heavily forested corner of historic Picardy is very much horse country.

There are some 3,000 thoroughbreds in training around Chantilly and world-class racing takes place at the track just out of town. There is international show jumping and dressage near the chateaux that date back to the 16th century, and exhibitions at the stunning Museum of the Living Horse in the Great Stables. In season, the sound of

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While England, Brazil and Chile played for the top prizes at last year’s World Championship, one man proved the real winner at France’s ‘Capitol of the Horse’. Herbert Spencer brings us the Picardy action

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THE ACTION

HERBERT SPENCER

Above: Chateau de Chantilly.

Left: France battles USA in an early World Cup match at nearby Polo Club du Domaine de Chantilly

hunting horns echo through the surrounding forests as elegantly clad riders and their hounds chase deer and wild boar. And, of course, there is polo, which was the main sporting focus of the horsey set last autumn during the VIIth World Championship of the Federation of International Polo (FIP).

The first small village you reach on the back road to Chantilly is Apremont. On its outskirts stands the impressive 18th-century gateway to what was once a farm of the Chateau de Chantilly. Behind the gate lie the offices, clubhouse and stables of the Polo Club du Domaine de Chantilly. Domaine de Chantilly, one of Europe’s largest polo centres and home of the French Open, was the venue for FIP’s World Cup 2004.

Over the preceding year, national teams of Hurlingham 45

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Above: Chantilly’s great stables are even bigger than the chateau. Left: exhibition in World Cup village. Below: FIP President Glen Holden, Patrick Guerand Hermès, The Rajmata of Jaipur

28 countries had battled to reach the final stage, during zone playoffs in Warwickshire, England; Lahore, Pakistan; Santiago, Chile; and Juarez, Mexico. England, Pakistan, Chile, Australia and the USA made it through to join reigning champions Brazil and the hosts, France.

At the end of 10 days and 16 hard-fought matches, it was the Brazil team that again mounted the podium to kiss the World Cup and receive FIP’s gold medals. England took silver and Chile bronze. The only medal missing was a platinum one that should have been cast for the man behind it all, the Chantilly club’s owner and World Cup organiser, Patrick Guerrand-Hermès.

The ever-elegant Patrick, a grand chevalier of the old school, staged the event with all the French style and panache that has made his family’s firm, Hermès, one of the world’s leading luxury brands. This World Cup was unlike any that had preceded it, at Melbourne, Santa Barbara, Berlin and Buenos Aires.

The organisation

by Patrick and his team was magnificent and the sportsmanship of players was outstanding

HERBERT SPENCER

HERBERT SPENCER

Take for example the ‘village’, the temporary collection of shops and hospitality facilities traditional at big polo events everywhere. Not content with just the rows of tents, Patrick created a vast quadrangle each side of which had a two-story wooden gatehouse in Picardy style through which visitors passed. The flagship shop inside the village was, of course, Hermès, housed in a wooden structure echoing the gatehouses.

The marquees forming the quadrangle included two restaurants serving fine French food and booths offering Picardy delicacies; hospitality centres of event title sponsor Maybach and those of other sponsors such

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HERBERT SPENCER HERBERT SPENCER

Top: England (in white) play Brazil in the final.

Centre, the victorious Brazil team and World Cup organiser Patrick Guerand Hermès.

Below, dancers at the Brazil team party

players was outstanding”.

England appeared the most disciplined team throughout the competition but in the final lost in extra time to the faster-breaking Brazil squad. The USA team, expected to be a strong contender, never gelled. Australia failed to win a single match. Pakistan, the only team financed by its government, played valiantly but lost in its league. A fired-up Chile took bronze by defeating France, which played with great talent and determination throughout the competition to the delight of the home crowd.

France will be a team to watch in future internationals. Patrick’s contribution to his country’s standing in world polo didn’t end after everyone went home. The new organisation he established to stage the World Cup, the Association Sportive France Polo, will continue to work to develop the country’s participation in the sport, at home and abroad.

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HERBERT SPENCER

as Emaar Properties of Dubai, decorated in desert Bedouin fashion; marquees selling polo gear and others promoting polo clubs from Pakistan to Mexico. At one corner was a yurt from Mongolia, a FIP member nation.

There was a large sand arena in the middle of the village where visitors watched displays of falconry and horsemanship by riders in Moorish dress.

Host and organiser Patrick, in dashing white Panama and navy blazer emblazoned with the FIP crest, seemed to be everywhere: welcoming French VIPs, foreign ambassadors and a United Nations of polo people; congratulating or commiserating with players on their victories or defeats, and, as midafternoon approached, hurrying all out of the village and onto the adjacent polo grounds.

Patrick had cleverly erected a giant, twosided and roofed grandstand between the club’s two main grounds: watch one match and then just walk across the aisle to view the other on the second ground. For the big World Cup opening parade, he brought on not just the mounted band of the French Presidential Guard and the eight competing teams and their ponies, but also riders representing Chantilly’s other horse sports: jockeys on thoroughbreds, show jumpers and dressage competitors, and huntsmen.

The six of Domaine de Chantilly’s grounds in use played superbly. One, only a year old, cut up hardly at all despite some heavy rain, thanks to the use of a new wonder, fibersoil.

There were few complaints about the pool of more than 250 ponies, loaned by Patrick and other French and overseas players, from which teams drew their mounts. FIP’s Tournament Director, Farouk Younes of Egypt, ran the competition with an iron hand and FIP’s president, Ambassador Glen Holden, was lavish in his praise. “The organisation by Patrick and his team was magnificent,” Holden said, “and the sportsmanship of the

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High goal ex The world’s biggest new polo club in almost three decades has six tournaments at the top end of the sport, contested by teams with superstar line-ups. Herbert Spencer takes a seat at the International Polo Club Palm Beach lorida’s Gold Coast has been the winter playground of wealthy Americans since the 1890s when oil magnate Henry M. Flager first developed Palm Beach as the ‘American Riviera’. Then, in the first half of the 20th century, polo was added to the coast’s attractions of beaches, balmy weather and high society.

All of American polo's great and good flocked to Palm Beach County between the wars, including newspaper publisher John Hay ‘Jock’ Whitney who piloted his yellow Sikorsky amphibian Pegasus to fly down from New York for winter polo. The oldest Gold

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Main picture: Action from the US Open final between White Birch and Skeeterville, with the impressive new stand in the background. Right: Skeeterville's Owen Rinehart hooks White Birch's Julio Gracida during the final's sudden-death chukka

Coast club still in existence is Gulfstream (1923), once high goal but now playing at lower levels. Two great high goal centres were established after the war, Royal Palm Polo and Sports Club in Boca Raton in 1968 and Palm Beach Polo and Country Club (PBPCC) in 1978.

Now the centre of attraction is International Polo Club Palm Beach (IPCPB), established last year after high goal team patrons got fed up with PBPCC. under its new management. IPCPB is the first club of its size to be founded anywhere in the world in almost three decades and the polo scene there is beyond compare.

This year, IPCPB had three 22-goal and three 26-goal

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DAVID LOMINSKA

x travaganza

DAVID LOMINSKA

tournaments and 22 teams entered in one or more of them, with line-ups that included 10 of the world’s 14 players who currently hold polo’s maximum rating of a 10-goal handicap.

The big one to win was of course the 2005 US Open Championship, third and last of the 26 goal contests. There were six or eight strong teams of the 15 entered that one could have put money on. The hungriest of the lot, however, was Peter Brant’s White Birch. Back in the 1990s Peter was, at handicap 7, the highest rated amateur in the world and over the years White Birch had won every high goal prize in the US – except for the Open.

White Birch showed its player and pony power early on by winning the first two 26-goal tournaments that preceded Hurlingham 49

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DAVID LOMINSKA

from declining PBPCC. John was already known as a mover and shaker in polo, having been largely responsible for putting Houston Polo Club back on the map. When he revealed his Florida plans to the US Polo Association, the governing body awarded its landmark Centennial US Open to IPCPB – before even one brick was laid.

John, who already had four polo grounds in place, built the club’s other facilities in just six months, including an impressive stadium of members’ box seats and bleachers; these were added to for 2005, along with a second restaurant and bar below the stadium The 2004 inaugural season at IPCBP was a resounding success. The Centennial of the Open drew players and supporters from all over the US, joined by the crème-de-la-crème of Palm Beach society. John capped it all by winning the Open with his Isola Carroll team, his second victory in the venerable contest.

The flood of money swirling around polo at IPCPB can only be compared to the torrent of water that Hurricane Francis dumped on the Gold Coast last year. John Goodman has already spent an estimated $9M on the club, not counting the value of its land in the area’s real estate boom. The team patrons as a group have spent millions on their own grounds, stables, pros and ponies. All things considered, the polo scene at the new International Polo Club Palm Beach has got to be the richest on the planet bar none.

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A charity match for the British Forces Foundation. Back row: The 2005 US team, Tommy Lee Jones, Tim Gannon, Adam Snow, Jim Whisenand. Bill and Linda Kraft, Monsell Darville of Bombay Sapphire. Front row: UK team, George Milford Haven, Julian Hipwood, Adrian Wade, Mark Cann.

HERBERT SPENCER

the Open. The team included patron Peter, now playing off 4; Mariano Aguerre, 10; Lucas Criado, 9; 17-year old Julio Gracida (son of 16-times Open winner Memo); and Del Walton, 4, as alternative. As it turned out, Peter had pressing business commitments and only played two Open matches, with no time for practice, and so withdrew for the final to leave the battle to his four professionals.

Facing White Birch in the final was Skeeter Johnston's Skeeterville: Skeeter playing off 2 and 8-goalers Owen Rinehart, Julio Arellano and Lucas Monteverde. White Birch had defeated Skeeterville 11-10 in the 26-goal Hall of Fame Cup, but the latter reached the Open final as No. 1 seed having won all six of their earlier matches in the final contest.

No surprise, then, that the final went into extra time. It was Criado who converted a 30-yard penalty 2 minutes into the 7th chukka to give White Birch it first victory in the 101-year old championship. Patron Brant was not even at the match, but now at least he can see White Birch’s name on the trophy.

Skeeterville's consolation was that its Julio Arellano was named Most Valuable Player and his mare Malice was named Best Playing Pony. And the hard-fought final, played before more than 7,000 spectators, provided a fitting finale to IPCBP's second season.

It was John Goodman of Houston who bit the bullet last year and, with the enthusiastic support of his fellow patrons, founded IPCPB, just five minutes

DAVID LOMINSKA

Above: Club owner John Goodman, right, and Memo Gracida, tired but ecstatic after winning the Centennial US Open.

It was Memo's 16th Open victory, an unassailable record.

Right: Matias Magrini in action for Old Pueblo in the 2005 26 goal.

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Land of open glory

Milo Fernandez Araijo and Juan Martin Nero Picture: Mike Roberts

A dramatic new format and some scintillating displays ensured that the Argentine Open will stay long in the memory says Charles Froggatt Hurlingham 51

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s Adolfo Cambiaso gleefully hurled his 52-inch mallet over the fence at Palermo into the traffic of Libertador Avenue, you could be forgiven for thinking that his La Dolfina team had just won the Open. No, this was the opening weekend of the 111th Argentine Open and the tension had already reached fever pitch as the 2002 champions came back to beat a young Ellerstina team in the dying seconds.

If the past couple of seasons in Argentina were good, solid, examples of how polo should be played, the 2004 season surpassed expectations, producing an exceptional vintage that, thanks to cable TV, was bottled

by ESPN. A combination of faster horses, a new tournament structure, even team line-ups and a new batch of promising players ensured that this would be the most exciting season in memory.

In 2003, the four Novillo Astrada brothers had squeezed the attacking bite out of their opponents with a defensive team strategy to win the three Triple Crown tournaments (Tortugas, Hurlingham and Argentine Opens) for La Aguada. In 2004, however, they would be unable to contain the horse power and flair of their opponents.

The season began with a strong showing from La Mariana in the Jockey Club Open.

The new Merlos team, under the watchful eye of the team’s godfather, movie star-cumpolo-guru Tommy Lee Jones, uncovered some serious thoroughbred speed to win the season opener.

But the Merlos brothers had, it appeared, shown their trump cards too early as the Triple Crown series began as 2003 had finished, with La Aguada winning the Tortugas Open. Business as usual for the Novillo Astradas, it seemed.

Then came the turn of the Hurlingham Open and Indios Chapalefu I, who hadn’t won a high goal tournament since Mariano Aguerre scored a golden goal to win the 2001 Argentine Open, showing some rediscovered form to win the trophy after overcoming La Mariana in the final.

A

And, so, to the Argentine Open, polo’s holy grail, which would be decided with a new system created by the late, great Argentine Polo Association president Gonzalo Taniora. The winners of two four-team zones would progress to the final, which meant there would be fewer games - and controversially no semi-finals - but more telling fixtures, with goal difference coming into play if there was no outright winner.

After the biggest dog-fight in years, Indios Chapaleufu II defied the form books to win their fourth Argentine Open title, finding their game just in time to set up and win against old family rivals Indios Chapaleufu I in the first Heguy showdown since 1996.

But their road to the final was rocky. Lacklustre performances against American debutants Isla Carroll, followed by a defeat to Ellerstina, meant that Chapa II had only an outside chance of reaching the 111th Eduardo Heguy (left) and Bautista Heguy Abierto final.

But the Heguys are Argentina’s most famous polo family for against the old enemy at the cathedral of good reason. They bounced back with an polo. The trophy will be back in Heguy outstanding display of four-man polo, hands, where it belongs,” said Chapa II’s knocking out La Dolfina to top the group on Eduardo Heguy. goal difference and deprive Adolfo Cambiaso The final was by no means a nail-biter, as of the chance to play in his seventh the other games had been, but was instead consecutive final. marred by an injury to Indios Chapaleufu As Eduardo Heguy hurled his hat into I’s Horacio Heguy whose horse tripped in the adoring crowd, one thing was certain the seventh chukka, slamming him onto the – a Heguy would be gulping champagne ground and breaking two of his ribs. from the Abierto trophy as both Indios Meanwhile, a new star was emerging, Chapaleufu teams had topped their groups Juan Martin Nero, Marcos Heguy’s team and qualified for the final. mate in the 2004 Gold Cup winning team “This is going to be the dream final. It’s Azurra. Nero, 23 was originally on stand-by,

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Opposite top left: Palermo 1, La Victoria.

Above: Eduardo Novillo Astrada, Juan Ignacio Merlos.

Left: Eduardo Heguy, Milo Fernandez Araijo, Ignacio Heguy and Alberto Heguy.

Below: Chapa 1 supporters

Ellerstina’s second game, the 18-year-old Facundo dramatically plucked a bouncing ball out of the air and redirected it into the goal to score the winner in the last minute of extra time. Palermo will be seeing a lot more of this rising star. but thanks to injuries ended up playing Meanwhile in Pilar Chico, England’s the entire Open for Chapa I. By the Tomlinson boys were making their mark end of the season he had been hailed as on Argentine soil. Luke and Mark, two of Argentina’s golden boy, an inspiration for England’s Coronation Cup team, qualified all aspiring local players who were not against all the odds with a 25-goal team for born into a polo dynasty like his teamthe highly coveted Camara de Diputados mates. tournament with Puerta Aierta, and almost Desperate to make their own mark pulled off an unheard-of victory. They were were the Pieres brothers. Sons of Gonzalo, minutes away from qualifying for the final one of the godfathers of Argentine polo. until they were denied by a 40 yard penalty.

Gonzalo Jr drove the young Ellerstina “It hurts right now, but we’ll be back,” said team forward from number three, while Luke Tomlinson. After his 2004 statement young gun Facundo mesmerised the in the House of Commons, you might just crowds with his stick-work up front. In believe him.

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Left: Jodie Kidd.

Right (l to r) Winners Negro Novillo Astrada, Juan Martin Nero, Stefano Marsaglia and Marcos Heguy

Gold Cup glory for A IT WAS ONE OF THE MOST exciting Gold Cups of all time – and the highest scoring final in the coveted trophy’s 48 year history.

In an extraordinary reversal of fortune following the semi finals three days earlier, when Dubai had seemed virtually invincible, it was the Azzurra side of Italian banker Stefano Marsaglia which dominated on Sunday July 18.

Azzurra had only narrowly beaten Larchmont 10-9 in the semi-final and went into the game as underdogs. But their Argentine 10-goaler Marcos Heguy, who has been in the Azzurra Oliver and Arabella Tobias.

Below, Mike Rutherford

side since it entered the high-goal world three years ago, combined brilliantly with 8-goaler Juan Martin Nero and, supported by Negro Novillo Astrada (5 goals), the team played a formidable game. By the end of the first half, the Azzurra side was 11-5 in the lead. When Marsaglia scored a perfect goal to close the fourth chukka at 13-5, victory was in sight.

“To score a goal and win the Gold Cup was beautiful and fantastic.

I was so happy and I am still so happy”, said Stefano

Right: Princess Beatrice and Sarah, Duchess of York 54 Hurlingham

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Stefano Marsaglia and Veuve Clicquot’s John West

Charlotte Methven

r Azzurra

Left: Amber Nuttall and Lord Patrick Beresford. Above: Marcos Heguy receives the ‘Most Valuable Player Award’ from Peter Holman

Alice Harvey and , right, Roddy Williams and friends

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Off the field, Veuve Clicquot’s VIP marquee was as stylishly decorated as ever: buckets of shocking pink daisies had their flower centres replaced with the image of the Widow plucked from the champagne bottles’ wire cork retainers.

While the 350 guests were royally entertained to lunch, the paparazzi feasted on Princess Beatrice. Meanwhile, the Duchess of York, who presented the Gold Cup, mingled and Jodie Kidd took the opportunity of introducing brand new fiancé Aidan Butler. Stefanie Powers looked radiant and the Cowdray family were as ever the most genial of hosts.

Above left, Kaja Wunder. Above: Azzurra arriving in the winner’s circle. Below, Lady Alexis Quintis. Bottom right, Lucas White

Left, Stephen Bayley. Right, Issy Van Randwyck

Below (l to r) Emily Pearson, Lord Cowdray, Eliza Pearson and Lady Cowdray

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CLARE MILFORD HAVEN

The pavilion at Kurland

Cape of new hope South Africa has made great strides in the sport and is now attracting some of the world’s top players. And with plenty on offer besides polo, no wonder its become a coveted winter fixture.

Clare Milford Haven reports Hurlingham 57

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Charles Cornwall

f the inaugural presence of South Africa’s highest handicapped player, 8-goaler Sugar Erskine, at December’s Kurland International wasn’t enough of an endorsement of how South African polo has progressed, then I don’t know what is.

Hotfoot from Argentina, where he had been playing in the Open, sponsored by his Palm Beach patron, John Goodman of Isla Carroll, the 29-year-old from Natal rode onto Kurland’s Number 1 ground to captain the South African team against England in a pair of white leather boots and knee pads handmade by Fagliano. It was a statement that spoke volumes (never mind not complying with the Blue Book’s stipulation of brown boots and knee pads).

It said: “Look at what I have achieved.

Let’s show the world what the Springboks are made of ”. And, but for a final goal by England captain, Henry Brett, they nearly pulled off a surprise win.

Although polo in South Africa was introduced by regiments of the British cavalry stationed in the Eastern Cape in the late 19th century, it is really only in the last three years that it has found itself more firmly on the international map. Until recently, South African polo was firmly rooted in Natal, the province with the most English influence.

Wealthy farmers from the area dominated the game around the two major polo venues – the Durban Shongweni Club and the Inanda Polo club. South African polo was a sport played almost entirely in Natal and East Griqualand.

Then, three years ago, the Natal farmers found that interest in the game was shifting towards the Western Cape, more specifically to Kurland, a few miles from Plettenberg Bay along the Garden Route. Kurland, a unique family owned luxury hotel is situated

I

in a stunning 700-hectare estate at the foothills of the Outeniqua mountains.

Established by the Behr family, the hotel has received countless awards for its style and comfort, but more recently has been inextricably linked with polo.

Keeping it in the family, Clifford Elphick, brother-in-law of Dianne Behr and coowner of Kurland, is a keen player and managing director of E. Oppenheimer & Sons. His dream was to establish a venue where people could enjoy the sport but also relax in style and comfort. This soon became a reality with the building of a stunning 160metre polo pavilion, five polo fields, stabling for up to 300 horses and a tack and repair shop all in situ on the Kurland estate.

Buoyed by Elphick, other polo devotees are also keen to put their stamp on the game.

Charles Cornwall bought the neighbouring farm to Kurland and established his team Kurland Park with its three fields; Bryan Myerson, patron of high goal team Shawford Park in the UK, created his own smaller club at Bitou, and more fields involving patrons Leo Baxter of Stonefield and Paul Main of Bateleur were played on for the first time this spring.

This enthusiasm by a small yet prolific group of patrons has raised the level of polo played in South Africa and encouraged players from all over the world to flock there. Apart from the annual International between South Africa and England, the Christmas and Easter 18-goal tournaments have encouraged the appearance of top international players such as Henry Brett, Luke and Mark Tomlinson, Alan Kent and Charles Beresford from the UK, Jose Donoso

from Chile, JP Clarkin from New Zealand, ‘Gonchie’ von Wernich from Argentina, ‘Pelon’ Stirling from Sotogrande, Spain and Ruki Baillieu from Australia.

Luke Tomlinson has described Kurland as ‘an awesome place. Like Ellerston by the sea’ and Malcolm Borwick, named Most Valuable Player in December’s International, confirmed that ‘the polo facilities are on a par with the best in the world and there are so many other things to do apart from just playing polo’.

This could explain what is attracting foreign players to Kurland from midDecember to mid-April, a time which, more traditionally, was dead in the European polo calendar. This season saw 33 teams competing in a range of tournaments from 4-18 goal and comprising of 132 players and approximately 924 horses. For players with families, it is perfect. No more yawning on the sidelines for bored teenagers or eternally patient grandparents. If you’ve had enough of cheering on and offering words of encouragement, there are a host of other activities to be enjoyed.

At Plettenberg Bay, or ‘Plett’ as it is universally known, a mere 15 minutes from Kurland, there are miles and miles of sweeping golden beaches where you can sunbathe or surf to your heart’s content. Just sitting in the sand watching the dolphins and seals playing is entertainment enough.

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Mark Tomlinson and Selby Williamson

Clockwise from top: Henry Brett; Paul and Sue Main; Leo Baxter, groom for the South African team; George Morgan, Clifford Elphick, Gonchie Von Wernich with wife Luis

PHOTOS BY CLARE MILFORD HAVEN AND MISSY BAILLIEU

A little further along the Garden Route towards Port Elizabeth is what professes to be ‘The World’s Hightest Bungy’ at 214m. Not for the faint-hearted. And, for those who want a taste of real Africa, within three hours you can fly yourself into the heart of the famous Kruger Park where the Big Five abound.

The first time I set foot in South Africa was Christmas three years ago.

We flew to Cape Town and after a cup of coffee in the Mount Nelson (where we bumped into friends and polo players Mike and Angie Rutherford), our plan was to gently meander from Cape Town to Kurland, taking in all the sights along the famous Garden Route. Perhaps some wine-tasting in Stellenbosch, a dozen oysters in Knysna, a refreshing swim in Plett… but news soon reached us that fellow-Cowdray cohort Alan Kent was playing in a final later in the afternoon.

Suddenly, everything changed. The gentle drive turned into a race against time. In fact we drove so fast that we managed to collect two speeding tickets, and the vineyards of Stellenbosch and lagoons at Knysna were but a passing blur on the horizon. We have been back every year since but now we fly from Cape Town. Why waste valuable time driving when we could be out there playing polo?

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Polo with altitu d THE WEATHER was freezing but the action was hot all over Switzerland, Russia, France, Italy and Austria.

Silk or high-tech thermal underwear was an unseen but essential part of the dress code for players and spectators alike during snow polo tournaments in subzero temperatures at some of Europe’s famous alpine ski resorts and at a golf club not far from the Kremlin.

Russa is the latest country to join the snow polo circuit that also includes St Moritz, Megève, Cortina d’Ampezzo and Kitzbuhel. The Moscow Polo Club was formed last year, bringing the game of kings back to cossack country for the first time since the communists deposed the tzar in the Russian Revolution.

This winter Russia’s new social elite turned out in force to watch polo on the snow at the Moscow City Golf Club.

The oldest and most glamorous snow polo scene is in St Moritz, where this version of the sport first started in 1985. The Swiss resort, home of the hair-raising, 80mph Cresta Run bobsleigh course, was treated to four days of icy action in the 21st Cartier Polo World Cup On Snow. The event was staged by St Moritz Polo Club on the snow-covered frozen lake where horse racing is also held. England’s Simon Holley and his Maybach team captured the cup.

The 10th annual Megève International Polo Masters on snow drew four teams to the French ski resort in the shadow of Mount Blanc. In the Italian resort of Cortina d’Ampezzo, six teams competed for the Audi Gold Cup this year, and there was also snow polo to be seen in the Italian ski centre of Livigno and at Kitzbuhel in the Austrian Alps.

Herbert Spencer

St Moritz Above left: (l to r) Chris Hyde, Simon Holley, Leon Hustinx (Maybach), Nacho Gonzales, Piki Diaz Alberdi Above: (l to r) Nacho Gonzales, Gabriel Donoso, Chris Hyde, Piki Diaz Alberdi, Oscar Mancini

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u de

The sport may boast unbridled excitement at sea level but anyone looking for an alternative thrill should take their mounts to the mountains

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Chile prove too hot for E

As Cartier marked two decades of sponsorship in the game, royalty and showbiz came out in force to celebrate an eventful and exciting International Day

ARTIER WAS CELEBRATING 20 years of sponsorship on International Day 2004. In the year that the company took over the support of this annual fixture from Ceresit in 1984, England were defeated by the Rest of the Commonwealth (8-7). In an echo of history, the home side could not overcome Chile in Cartier’s anniversary year either.

The Chileans, who were playing in their third Coronation Cup game, were the dominant team throughout.

The fabulous pairing of the Donoso

C

Prince Harry takes part in the Golden Jubilee Cup

brothers – Gabriel and Jose – proved unbeatable. England were playing with a new line-up; Mark Tomlinson joining the squad for the first time and Henry Brett making his International Day debut as captain. But England struggled against a strong and cohesive

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r England

South American team, losing 10-8.

Nina Vestey was invited into the presentation area after the main match to receive the Ferguson Cup for the best young player of the year from Sarah, Duchess of York. Nina has been a pivotal member of the Foxcote team and also played for the Hildon squad, winners of the Gold Cup in 2003.

The South American theme was continued in Cartier’s marquee, with the help of interior designer David Collins. The lunch, again prepared by Anton Mosimann, included a roast fillet of lamb with a coconut and herb crust and a Gianuja chocolate soufflé glace.

Guests included David Hasselhoff, Lord Frederick Windsor, Jodie Kidd, Angela Rippon and Joshua Jackson.

Princess Beatrice and Princess Eugenie, daughters of the Duke and Duchess of York, were on hand to support their cousin, Prince Harry, who again turned out for the Prince of Wales team in the morning match for the Golden Jubilee Cup. Despite some strong play from the red shirts, they were unable to claim a third successive victory. Honours in 2004 went to the Hurlingham squad, who snatched a narrow 7.5-6 victory.

The line-up shows: JJ Diaz Alberdi, Will Lucas, Mark Tomlinson, Henry Brett, Luke Tomlinson, Arnaud Bamberger, HRH the Queen, John Tinsley, Lionel Soffia, Gabriel Donoso, Jaime Huidobro, Jose Donoso, Alejandro Vial and JJ Brane

Clockwise from top: Angela Rippon and Dr Scott Miller; Princesses Eugenie and Beatrice; Lord Frederick Windsor and Amanda Sheppard; Lady Eloise Anson; Lady Isabella Hervey and Yvonne, Marchioness of Bristol; Tara PalmerTomkinson; Meredith Ostrom and Charlie Muirhead; Michael Buerk and Carol Barnes

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Passing thought

by Roger Scruton

nervous system, just as the rider’s startled face reveals that he has lost the use of his limbs. Neither horse nor rider enjoys this moment, since happiness for both lies in complete surrender to a collective movement. But when harmony prevails their faces radiate serenity. Their togetherness is akin to that of a happy marriage, with four eyes looking at a common target, and four feet going towards it at their own considered pace.

One of the most interesting results of this togetherness is the jump. Left to themselves horses seldom jump, and can be kept in a field by the lowest of fences. When ridden at those fences, however, they will jump smoothly over them. This fact proves the essential incompleteness of the horse. He will jump as part of the herd; but alone, as an individual, he lacks the will.

Because I treat my horse as an individual, therefore, I see him as incomplete – or rather, as something to be completed, and completed by me.

From this fact flows all the emotion that I pour into our subsequent union.

I would not call this emotion love: it is both more visceral and more distant than love, requiring me both to surrender to the horse’s rhythms and at the same time to govern his will. Nevertheless, it is one of the most rewarding emotions that a human being can feel. From it spring all the gestures of endearment, all the tender caresses and pleasurable gifts pianist plays the keyboard, in a dialogue so that our horses enjoy. And even if they do intimate that the player becomes the played. not understand these gestures as a human The horse’s mouth is your true fingertip, would – for after all, they lack the concept and the tremor in the rein continues of gift, and regard us, when on our feet, the pulse in your nerves. Likewise, the as amazing and perplexing features of the movement in your back and neck begins natural order – they come to understand in his hindquarters, and your eyes move in that we belong together. And it is there obedience to his feet. Together you master that our shared joy in each other begins. the land, and at no point should there be the slightest difference of opinion as to how Professor Roger Scruton was Professor of and how fast to traverse it.

Aesthetics at Birkbeck College London and If differences of opinion arise Professor of Philosophy at Boston University nevertheless, the result is a kind of Massachusetts. He now describes himself schizophrenia, as action and intention fall as Grand Panjandrum of Horsell’s Farm apart. When a horse refuses a fence he rolls Enterprises – Britain’s fastest-growing posthis eyes and puts back his ears, showing modern rural consultancy. Services range from that he has lost contact with his central logic chopping to log cutting.

LEE PETERS

HORSES ARE BEAUTIFUL TO LOOK AT, and exciting to ride. Their smell is alluring, and their smooth coats invite you to touch, to pat and to stroke.

Probably no animal more directly appeals to the human senses and the human heart. But all this is nothing besides the unique bond between horse and rider, whereby each makes use of the other’s best endowment – the legs of the horse, and the brain of the man.

The resulting centaur is equipped to triumph over dangers that neither horse nor man could confront alone.

Stephen Budiansky has even argued that our two species have survived only because we learned to pool our resources, so heavily were the evolutionary odds stacked against us. (See The Nature of Horses, London 1998.)

Whether or not that is true, those who have entrusted themselves to a horse in some risky adventure – be it polo, hunting, racing or even a cavalry charge – will have some inkling of the extraordinary mutuality that arises between man and horse when facing danger together. He trusts you because you trust him because he trusts you – and so on to infinity, the deep infinity of our species bond.

To the ignorant observer, a rider is simply a person sitting on a horse, who uses bit and boots to start and stop the vehicle beneath him. It is an organic vehicle, entirely biodegradable. But in every other respect it is inferior to a car, and not much preferable to a bicycle. To the practised rider, however, the horse is not a vehicle at all, but an extension of himself. The legs move with a human will, just as the thoughts and plans arise from a body with four feet on the ground. You do not make the horse turn: the two of you turn together, with a single movement that originates in your common brain.

You do not stop the horse or start him; you move off as one, and come to a halt together. Every little movement is informed by the same mutuality of impulse, and every muscle is jointly owned. Your fingers play the bridle as a

What explains the unique bond between horse and rider? A leading philosopher offers a personal view

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