To play polo on the highest stage, you need to love horses or be filthy wealthy. Ideally each. A crew may discipline round 40 ponies for every recreation and draw on a roster of tons of of probably playable horses for every match. Within the gaps between tournaments, prime gamers scour the globe for brand spanking new equine expertise—attempting to snaffle foals from elite bloodlines or trying to ex-racehorses to uncover a polo star within the tough.
Conventional horse breeding is a lottery: Throw collectively even your greatest mare and stallion and there’s no approach of figuring out how their genetics will mix. Their filly might be a dud, and also you’d nonetheless have to attend a number of years to know for positive. You handle the horse, secure it, feed it for 2 years earlier than you even attempt to experience it. Then you definitely train it to alter leads, hearken to your legs, activate a dime, and go from 30 mph to zero with out injuring itself. All alongside you pay for vets, grooms, farriers, breakers, feed, transport, and tack. You’re speaking tens of hundreds of {dollars} annually. Lastly round age 5, the horse is prepared for its first polo match. So you are taking the horse to the sector and … it spooks as quickly because it takes its first bump from one other pony. Now you could have an unenviable selection. Do you sink one other 10 grand into coaching, or promote the mare at a steep low cost?
Then there are the gamers: In Argentina, polo is arguably second solely to soccer as the game of nationwide obsession. The highest polo gamers are family names; those that enterprise into the worldwide polo circuit are referred to as “employed assassins.” Almost each top-ranked polo participant is from Argentina, and so are the game’s greatest horses.
All of this is the reason polo relies on a system of patronage. Groups are bankrolled by rich sponsors, who rent the perfect Argentine assassins whereas conserving them equipped with Argentine ponies, bridles, bandages, reins, saddles, trailers, vehicles, helmets, mallets, kneeguards, and the thousand different bills a polo crew may incur. In return, the patron, a polo novice, will get to play on the crew.
Lastly, a handicap system retains this delicate dance of cash and ability in movement. Polo gamers are assigned a ranking that corresponds to their ability. The best is 10—Cambiaso is one in every of fewer than a dozen such gamers on the earth—and the bottom is a whole novice at –2. Most patrons hover round a handicap of 0. The summed handicaps of all 4 gamers on a crew can’t exceed a sure quantity, basically guaranteeing a mixture of amateurs, up-and-comers, and seasoned skilled gamers.
{Photograph}: Gabriella Angotti-Jones
Within the mid-2010s, simply as Cambiaso was attempting out his first clones on the polo discipline, a brand new patron emerged on the US polo scene. A former president of the Financial institution of Moscow, Andrey Borodin fled his native Russia in 2011, discovering political asylum within the UK, the place he purchased Park Place—a palatial 18th-century property that when belonged to the daddy of King George III. The reported £140 million ($187 million) that Borodin paid for Park Place made it the costliest residence ever offered within the UK on the time.
Park Place additionally lent its identify to Borodin’s new polo crew, which the Russian exile began to fill with a number of the world’s greatest gamers and ponies. Aristocratically pale and with the trace of a paunch filling out his royal blue and yellow jersey, Borodin himself performed with a handicap of 0. Thanks largely to his abilities off the polo discipline, the Russian billionaire patron and his crew started to shake up the English polo scene, profitable the 2017 Royal Windsor Cup—as Queen Elizabeth II watched from the stands—earlier than turning to high-goal matches within the US. From nearly nothing, Borodin was constructing Park Place right into a formidable new pressure in elite polo, largely with the sheer energy of his fortune. Borodin had the cash to purchase the perfect horses on the planet. However he nonetheless lacked an edge that Cambiaso had—one which wasn’t on the market.
