The Horse Whisperer

Horses provide the linchpin of the society season, and nothing is quite so glamorous as a day at the polo. But for the players, there’s more to matchday than swigging Champagne. Kat Brown saddles up

I am sitting on an extremely expensive brown and white polo pony named Margarita, reins in my left hand, a disconcertingly vast mallet in my right, when my tutor, the former England polo captain Malcolm Borwick, calls out, “Kat, give her a canter!”

I tilt the reins forward, as though controlling a joystick. I am a bit worried about breaking her. To buy a schoolmaster such as Margarita, or other good medium-goal ponies, you’re talking £15,000-25,000, with top-end ponies selling in the hundreds of thousands. Margarita pricks up her ears and moves into trot. A little tilt further, and she rolls into the smoothest of canters. 

“Now, hit the ball,” yells Borwick. 

Margarita and I head towards one of the white balls scattered across Ham Polo Club’s luscious green pitch. I aim, swing my mallet, and miss by such a margin that Margarita audibly sighs. My team mates and I have spent the morning practising various forehand and backhand shots on the pitch – but it’s amazing how much easier to hit a ball when you’re standing still and not perched on a four-legged animal.

In keeping with many beloved English pastimes, polo was adopted from other countries who play it significantly better. Nicknamed ‘the sport of kings’, it has been a global favourite for more than 2,000 years, originating in Iran, where it was wildly popular, both with nobility, and as a way of training mounted troops. 

“Polo is the sum of all sports,” Borwick tells me later. At 42, he’s tall, lean and tanned – exactly as you’d expect an ambassador for the sport to be. He’s also charming, extremely jolly, and passionate about helping people fall in love with polo.

“It has the best elements of every sport you could think of: teamwork, adrenaline, technical difficulties beyond any other sport there is, and you can play it all over the world in amazing locations,” he says.

By the 1800s, polo had long been popular in India where it was called pulu after the wooden ball used. The name was anglicised after the first polo club was established in Silchar in Assam in 1833, with British officers picking up the game – and the complex rules.

“We change ends every time a goal is scored, which always confuses the life out of people,” Borwick says  . “In India pitches were on a slope so it was fair to change, now they’re laser-levelled, but the rules were written in the 1860s and we’re still working from 38-page documents.”

Historically, the best players have always come from Argentina since the Brits introduced them to the game in 1870. This is a country that adores horses and takes riding seriously. The low, flat plains, or pampa are perfect training grounds for polo ponies, and breeding and playing are often family trades stretching back generations. However, England has some of the most classic grounds. Over the past century, the matches that take place at the likes of Guards Club in Windsor, Cowdray Park in West Sussex and Beaufort Polo Club in Gloucestershire, in England’s most stunning locations, have become a mainstay of the British social ‘season’, which also incorporates the racing at Royal Ascot and Goodwood. But it’s polo that really brings the party, as Sophia Money-Coutts, a society journalist who spent many years observing the season for the British magazine Tatler, before putting her knowledge into her novels, explains.

“British toffs [very upper-class person] love polo because they love horses and like to watch handsome Argentines or royal princes gallop up and down on them,” she says. “You have big summer polo dates at smart clubs such as Guards, where members of the royal family will mingle with the aristocracy, vaguely watching the action on the field in front of them but probably knocking back a glass of Pimm’s and chatting at the same time.”

Rated at seven goals each, Luke Tomlinson, England captain James Beim, and young star Max Charlton are currently the biggest stars in English professional polo, but Princes William and Harry also lend star power to charity matches, which have become big dates on the calendar. “People like to be seen at the polo, even though if you asked your average punter how long a chukka [play] is they'd be hard-pushed to answer,” says Money-Coutts.

June and July are Borwick’s favourite times to watch polo in England, especially at Cowdray in West Sussex (“the birthplace of British polo”) where the Gold Cup brings a thrilling electrifying polo (and terrific picnics) to the park each year. He also has some global suggestions picked up from 20 years of travelling the world. “Kurland Park in South Africa where I played my debut test match is just beautiful. The best family destination is Apes Hill Polo Club in Barbados: you’ve got the Caribbean holiday for the family, and great sport. And Campo Argentino in Buenos Aires is the cathedral of polo. I played for England against Argentina there a couple of times and it’s extraordinary.”

To anyone not born to the sport, polo can seem rather elitist, or difficult to learn. However, children’s polo lessons have long been established in the Pony Club, and increasingly adults, from keen riders to complete beginners, are learning too, thanks to increasing ambassador work done by polo evangelists such as Borwick.

Polo is in his blood: his great-grandfather and his two brothers used to own Rugby Polo Club, and represented England in 1902, and his grandmother played in the first ladies test match in 1924. “My father played in the army and swore he’d never let me play because it was too expensive,” he grins. “But I had the opportunity to play in Pony Club when I was ten and the rest of history.’

With more than 50 caps for England and a captaincy under his belt, the six-goal player spends the year playing for teams around the world and has taught polo to clients (I am tactfully if untruthfully reassured that I am not the worst) in 30 countries, from the beach on Sanya in China, to the lake in St Moritz. Today I am somewhere less exotic, if no less beautiful. Ham Polo Club is just outside the leafy environs of Richmond in the far reaches of southwest London, and only a few miles from the Hurlingham Polo Club in Fulham, which hosts Chestertons Polo in the Park, one of a global series of city polo events that aims to bring the thrill of the game to a new audience.

And it’s actually easier to pick up the basics as a newcomer than that 38-page document might imply. There are four players per team, with play divided into short, sharp seven-minute bursts (the aforementioned chukkas). Their mounts – always referred to as ponies, whatever their height – are exchanged for a new pony after each chukka (you’re looking at more than 50 ponies per game, once you factor in the two umpires) with the aim being to score goals. Players are graded on a goal system, with the maximum being ten goals. Argentina has the greatest concentration of ten-goal players in the world, and professional players working the season must choose whether to carry on working, or to invest their earnings in training by spending a few months of the year in Argentina honing their skills. Men and women can play on an equal footing as teams can be mixed, which makes a pleasant change from many sports ­– Yoanna Otto, married to England star Charlie Hanbury, is one such ‘polo wife’ who is also highly adept on the pitch.

The bestselling British author Jilly Cooper brought the high-voltage nature of polo to a wider audience with her 1991 bestseller Polo – still a fabulous, gossipy favourite of the horsey classes, although I am slightly saddened to learn from Borwick that, these days, helicopters are used more to spray fields than for team owners to seduce other people’s wives. Polo’s cultural influence continues: the Argentinian player Ignacio ‘Nacho’ Figueras has a successful line of polo books very much in a Cooper vein, and the fashion house Sterling & Singh is inspired by the polo fashions and colours of the 1930s, when designer Tasha Sterling’s great-uncle, Stewart Iglehart, played ten-goal polo for the USA. You might also remember Richard Gere showing Julia Roberts how to tread in the divots in the 1990 classic film Pretty Woman (no high heels, please). Even now, the fashion designer` Alexa Chung says that she still uses Roberts’ brown and white polka dot dress as inspiration for her own season dressing.

Despite being a mainly female crew, my polo class is leagues away from silk dresses and sensible heels: we are kitted out in La Martina polo shirts, jeans and long boots. With ages ranging from late 20s to 40s, every one of us is a polo newcomer, with a few who have never ridden a horse before. The promise of being able to go from that to actually making a horse move, and hitting a ball at the same time, has got everyone hooked. When we arrive, we spend a couple of hours spent learning the strokes, and trying not to destroy the groundskeeper’s beautifully maintained pitch. One chap is having great success with his strokes, and I feel disheartened until I learn that he is an avid golfer. Then we divide into teams and have a go at a polo match on foot. I haven’t played team sports since school – this is infinitely more fun than hockey.

Having proven that we can just about control our mallets, we climb up onto wooden horses and have a go at hitting the ball while trying to keep a hold of our reins – and then it’s time to have a go on a real polo pony. It’s a completely different discipline to the horse-riding I know, and in the space of ten minutes, I have to unlearn everything I’ve been doing for the past 20 years. I need to feel much looser in the saddle – that, and take great care not to bash poor Margarita with my mallet. It’s soon evident that Margarita’s brain is at risk the longer I attempt to hit the ball, so I soon give up on doing so while moving, and have a canter around the pitch, mallet raised in the air and safely out of Margarita’s way.

Borwick gestures for me to get off, hops on Margarita and gives an effortless demonstration of the pony’s ability to turn in a very small space and accelerate. With Borwick at the reins she’s more luxury sportscar than animal.  The polo ponies are the backbone of each team’s success, and the ones that know their job are worth their weight in gold. “I have just retired a horse who’s been with me for 13 years, a beautiful grey called Irish who was an absolute rock star,” says Borwick. “You couldn’t school him, couldn’t ride him, but you put him on the polo pitch and he was incredible.”

The ponies and their characters are just as much a part of the thrill of the game as the humans on board and after today’s lesson, I’m significantly better placed in understanding the action for next time I watch the professionals. For one thing, I feel confident that they will hit the ball…

This piece was originally published in translation in High Life China