Can Cambiaso win unprecedented triple-triple aged 40?
UK Telegraph’s John Horswell on why Cambiaso has rarely been outplayed in polo and why bullying him does not always work
Adolfo Cambiaso bestrides the Pacific and Atlantic polo seasons like a Colossus, but the ‘away’ season from Argentina this year has been just a tad more special in his mind. As he finished off the European high goal season in Sotogrande nine days ago on the winning Dubai team, celebration soon turned to preparation.
“It’s great to finish the European season here,” he said. “I’ll now go back to Argentina to rest a little bit and get ready for the Open. You play on similar fields and with similar balls. It also has similar weather.”
Mentally, Sotogrande was a process of getting ready for three major campaigns in his homeland.
Doing the triple triple, winning the three major tournaments for a third time with his team eats away at his mind, he admitted to The Telegraph. La Dolfina defeated Ellerstina in last year’s Argentine Open, and equalled the record set in the 1975 season by the Colonel Suarez team.
“Achieving that has been on my mind since we finished in Argentina last year,” the world’s most revered active player said.
“We have a big chance to be the only team to do it. We tied up with the Colonel Suarez team. Now we want to be the only ones. I’ll rest now for ten or twenty days.”
But then he will into the saddle once more. “The horses are part of my life, though. I never tire of the horses.”
But I’ve witnessed Cambiaso brilliant, aggressive, and also a tired man this season, at times. We know he loves the sport, his horses, the big occasion.
But how do the daily physio sessions, the ice packs on shoulders and wrists, affect the 40-year-old, on the road playing for almost two and a half decades? Is the end of his high goal campaigning close to the end?
As ladies swoon and admire on the edge of fields, as Cambiaso mesmerizes polo aficionados with his skills, John Horswell, one of the most respected figures in British polo offered his insight into what pleases us, athletically and aesthetically about the great 10-goal player.
“Cambiaso has fast twitch fibre, hand-eye coordination, and crucially, wingspan,” explained Horswell, who could lay claim to have helped develop and assist all the British - and some overseas players - of 5 goals or more over the last twenty years.
Wingspan means he can control the ball ridiculously far forward and he can control the ball ridiculously far back,” Horswell said. “What it means is he can show you the ball here, move it back here and then when you have a look at it there, he’s gone here again.”
On the person, Horswell is perhaps even metro complimentary. “He’s a lovely guy. My kids play polo with his kids a bit. He’s so enthusiastic,” he said.
“He’s really good at what he does. He makes really good teams. He’s got much cleverer at that in his old age. He has a very close-knit and supportive group around him. He’s an understated leader but he’s definitely a leader. He has a lot of attributes over and above his talent.”
Does Cambiaso receive enough praise and attention from the wider sporting world? “It’s very difficult when a lot of his body of work has been done in a pro-am media. What he’s done in the Argentine Open is obvious and plain to see,” added Horswell.
A wizard on a horseback, in other words, perhaps? But how to mark Cambiaso out of the game, to stretch him?
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“He has been bullied out of some games. There was a semi-final of the Gold Cup, we were leading by three goals going into the last chukka against Dubai. I’m looking at Cambiaso on his chair and he’s been run into, run over, whatever, and doesn’t want to know. He goes out eventually. I said ‘we’re going to lose this game’. He went out and we lost the chukka four-nil.”
The old master, it seems, has an answer for everything. The triple triple this season might just be a fitting finale which sees Cambiaso decide that enough is enough.
Polo should treasure Cambiaso while it can. At his age, given what he has achieved, the bar is set so high it might be close to the end of his elite career.
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