Ghastly? Yes. Vulgar? That too. But it helps Aids orphans
● Of all the ways to raise awareness of the plight of Aids sufferers in Southern Africa, playing polo among the pine trees of Rome seems an odd one.
But such is the lure of and fascination with this very royal sport that Prince Harry touching down in Italy for a match on Friday drew global media coverage and drummed up huge donations for his charity, Sentebale.
Polo has always been riddled with paradoxes. It is at once chic yet astonishingly vulgar; a world in which money and privilege come hurtling together in a heady rush of sweaty ponies and clashing egos.
As Jilly Cooper captured in her 1991 novel Polo, the sport is a cauldron of sex, money, power and revenge, but mainly money.
To play at Prince Harry’s level or above, you either need to be fabulously rich or from Argentina. It is the quickest way for a billionaire to fast-track themself into the orbit of the royal family, because anyone with enough cash can assemble a team that will stick-and-ball its way to the top tiers of the premier polo podiums.
Each team has four players, each with a handicap ranging from minus 2 to 10. This number is based on performance and is awarded and constantly reassessed by the international regulatory body, the Hurlingham Polo Association (HPA).
Teams, therefore, have a total point score, based on the four handicaps of their players. What this means, for the busy billionaire, is that even if your handicap is zero, your chequebook can do the hard work for you: simply buy in three players with handicaps of 9 or 10 and, hey presto, you’ve got a 30point team.
Which is why polo, in its own way, is weirdly egalitarian. Take Spencer McCarthy, owner of the Emlor Polo Team. Aged 13, he was working on a building site as a tea boy. Now he is the gazillionaire owner of Churchill Retirement Living, whose team is one of 12 jostling to win this year’s Queen’s Cup. This remains the most prestigious trophy in the polo calendar, because the queen still turns up to present the prize.
Another team belongs to Aiyawatt Srivaddhanaprabha, the 33-year-old Thai billionaire whose father owned Leicester Football Club and was killed in a helicopter crash last year.
A third owner is Andrey Borodin, a former KGB officer and president of the Bank of Moscow, who is wanted by Interpol for an alleged fraud. His team, Park Place, is named after Britain’s most expensive house, which he bought in 2012 for £140m (about R2.6bn now).
What an odd cast of characters, you might think. But look at the industry they are supporting. Polo attracts the type of Cristal-spraying plutocrats who are able — and willing — to blow millions of pounds on dozens
of ponies, which each require feeding, medicating, housing and transporting. Then there are the armies of grooms, trainers, vets and buy-in riders.
As a form of social climbing, polo is refreshingly honest, because nobody makes a secret about the fact that he who spends the most, wins the prizes. This is what makes polo so fabulous and so ghastly at the same time.
The great thing about a polo match is that you can tell where people fit into the pecking order simply by looking at them. Easiest to spot is the patron — pronounced “pa-TRON” — the paunchy one panting his way behind the rest of the field.
The hired players are the impossibly handsome Argentinians with tousled, shoulder-length hair, tossing their manes as they thwack yet another ball into the goal from half a mile away.
The WAGs are easy to spot in their tight white jeans, stilting along on Manolo Blahniks with a pair of bejewelled pugs in tow.
Then there are the bodyguards, and drivers, and hassled personal assistants, all looking quite out of place.
Such is the world of polo, for teams with a total handicap of 22 or more. Lower down the ranks, polo remains a Sloaney staple, enthusiastically played at British public schools and universities by honking Henriettas pulling on their boots out of the back of tatty VW Golfs.
The HPA puts a lot of money into subsidising polo at this lower level, keen to encourage youngsters. But the cruel truth is, once they’ve left university, few can afford to play polo — even if they earn a decent salary.
Their only hope is to pray they’ve got some Argentine blood, or to marry a billionaire.