To play polo on the highest stage, it’s a must to love horses or be filthy wealthy. Ideally each. A workforce may subject round 40 ponies for every recreation and draw on a roster of lots of of doubtless playable horses for every event. Within the gaps between tournaments, prime gamers scour the globe for brand new equine expertise—making an attempt 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 finest mare and stallion and there’s no approach of understanding how their genetics will mix. Their filly could possibly be a dud, and also you’d nonetheless have to attend a number of years to know for certain. You handle the horse, steady it, feed it for 2 years earlier than you even attempt to trip it. Then you definately 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} every year. Lastly round age 5, the horse is prepared for its first polo match. So you’re taking the horse to the sphere and … it spooks as quickly because it takes its first bump from one other pony. Now you may 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 finest horses.
All of because of this polo will depend on a system of patronage. Groups are bankrolled by rich sponsors, who rent the perfect Argentine assassins whereas retaining them provided with Argentine ponies, bridles, bandages, reins, saddles, trailers, vehicles, helmets, mallets, kneeguards, and the thousand different bills a polo workforce may incur. In return, the patron, a polo newbie, will get to play on the workforce.
Lastly, a handicap system retains this delicate dance of cash and ability in movement. Polo gamers are assigned a score that corresponds to their ability. The very best is 10—Cambiaso is certainly one of fewer than a dozen such gamers on the planet—and the bottom is an entire novice at –2. Most patrons hover round a handicap of 0. The summed handicaps of all 4 gamers on a workforce can’t exceed a sure quantity, primarily guaranteeing a mixture of amateurs, up-and-comers, and seasoned skilled gamers.
{Photograph}: Gabriella Angotti-Jones
Within the mid-2010s, simply as Cambiaso was making an attempt out his first clones on the polo subject, 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 after belonged to the daddy of King George III. The reported £140 million ($187 million) that Borodin paid for Park Place made it the most costly residence ever bought within the UK on the time.
Park Place additionally lent its identify to Borodin’s new polo workforce, which the Russian exile began to fill with a number of the world’s finest 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 expertise off the polo subject, the Russian billionaire patron and his workforce started to shake up the English polo scene, successful 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.
