Polo At the highest level you need to love horses or be muddy. Perfectly both. The team can put up about 40 ponies for each game and pull out hundreds of potentially games on the list that can be played for every tournament. In the gaps between tournaments, the best players search the globe in search of a fresh talent of horses-trying in elite blood lines or looking for former races to discover the polo star.
Time-honored horse breeding is a lottery: drop even your best mare and stallion and it is not possible to find out how their genetics will combine. Their filly can be failure and you will still have to wait a few years to know for sure. You take care of the horse, stable, you feed him for two years before you try to drive it. Then you teach him to change leads, listen to your legs, joining and moving from 30 miles per hour to zero without hurting yourself. You pay for vet, stable, farriers, switches, feed, transport and tissues all the time. You speak tens of thousands of dollars each year. Finally, about 5 years a pony is ready for the first polo match. So you take the horse to the field and … it is exposed as soon as he takes his first tumor from another pony. Now you have an impossible choice. Will you sink another 10 trash in training or do you sell a mare with a steep discount?
There are also players: in Argentina Polo is probably the second after football is a sport in the domestic housing. The best polo players are household names; Those who venture into the international polo region are known as “hired killers”. Almost every best polo player comes from Argentina, as is the best horses of this sport.
All this is why the polo depends on the patronage system. The teams are bankned by wealthy sponsors who employ the best Argentine killers, at the same time delivered with Argentine ponies, heal, bandages, reins, saddles, trailers, trucks, helmets, hammers, knees and a thousand other expenses that Polo team may incur. In return, the patron, an amateur polo, can play in the team.
Finally, the system of impairment maintains this fine dance of money and skills in motion. Polo players assign a grade that corresponds to their skills. The highest is 10 – Cambias is one of the less than a dozen such players in the world – and the lowest is a complete novice aged -2. Most patrons float around Handicap 0. The summed difficulties of all four players in the team cannot exceed a specific number, fundamentally guaranteeing a mixture of amateurs, developing players and experienced professional players.
Photo: Gabriella Power-Jones
In the mid -2010., just like Cambiaso tried his first clones in the Polo field, a fresh patron appeared on the Polo stage. The former president of the Moscow bank, Andrey Borodin, escaped from his hometown Russia in 2011, finding political asylum in the UK, where he bought the Place-Palacka Park of the 18th century estate, which once belonged to the father of King George III. Reported 140 million pounds (187 million dollars), which Borodin paid for Park Place, made him the most exorbitant house ever sold in Great Britain.
Park Place also borrowed its name to the fresh Polo Borodina team, which Russian exile began to fill one of the best players in the world. Aristocratically pale and with a hint of Pauna filling his royal blue and yellow T-shirt, Borodin himself played with Handicap 0. Thanks to his field, the Russian billionaire of the patron and his team began to shake the English Polo scene, winning the Royal Windsor Cup 2017-as Queen Elizabeth II looked from the stands. With almost nothing, Borodin built Park Place into a powerful fresh strength in the elite polo, mainly with the pure power of his fortune. Borodin had money to buy the best horses on the planet. But he still lacked the advantage of Cambiao – one that was not for sale.