Inside the polo billionaires’ club
As Prince Harry lands in Rome for a charity match, Matthew Bell unravels the uber-privileged world of the sport of kings
Of all the ways to raise awareness of the plight of Aids sufferers in Lesotho, playing polo among the pine trees of Rome seems an odd one. But such is the lure and fascination of this very royal sport that Prince Harry touching down in Italy for a charity match today has yanked the cameras of the world’s media on to him, and drummed up a huge wodge of cash for his charity.
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 brilliantly captured in her cult 1991 novel Polo, the world of the high-goal international 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 themselves 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.
To understand why, you have to understand the structure of the game. Each team has four players, each with a handicap ranging from -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 its 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 30-point team and you’re playing polo at Guards in front of the Queen.
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 for £2.50 per morning. 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 to the winner.
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 autumn. A third is Andrey Borodin, a former KGB officer and president of Bank of Moscow wanted by Interpol for an alleged fraud. His team, Park Place, is named after the estate outside Henley he bought in 2012 for £140million, making it Britain’s most expensive house.
What a gruesome cast of characters, you might think. But look at the industry they are supporting, which brings more than £300 million to the economy. Polo attracts the type of Cristal-spraying plutocrats who are able – and willing – to blow millions of pounds on dozens, if not hundreds, of ponies, which each require feeding, medicating, housing and transporting. Then there are the armies of grooms, trainers, vets and buy-in riders who depend on their bosses’ hunger to buy into the sport of kings to keep on spending.
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.
There are some slightly less flash polo players, who add a veneer of grand old English respectability. Figures like the Vestey family, which made its fortune packing meat in South America and lives at Stowell Park, near Cirencester. Or the Pearsons, whose Cowdray Park estate in West Sussex has one of the most beautiful polo grounds in England. Or the Tomlinsons – mother Claire owns the Beaufort Polo Club in Gloucestershire and was once the greatest female player, while her sons Mark and Luke are best friends with Princes William and Harry.
All of which provides the most riotous spectacle for the rest of us. Over the next three months, as the high-goal polo season gets under way, the man on the Clapham omnibus can get right up close to the uber-rich by simply walking into the right gate of Windsor Great Park. There, in front of the Queen, titans of industry will thrash out their differences to the thwack and rumble of eight polo ponies charging up and down the pitch.
The most famous of these was Kerry Packer, the late Australian media mogul who loved polo so much he had a heart attack during a particularly vigorous game.
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, shoulderlength hair, tossing their manes as they thwack yet another ball into the goal from half a mile away. The Wags are easy to spot, stilting along on foot-high Manolo Blahniks and tight white jeans, a pair of bejewelled pugs in tow. Then there are the bodyguards, and drivers, and hassled personal assistants, all looking quite out of place amid the bucolic serenity of West Sussex or Cirencester Park.
Such is the world of high-goal polo, for teams with a total handicap of
22 or more. Lower down the ranks, polo remains a Sloaney staple, enthusiastically played at 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 to take it up. 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. Which, if they hang around the fields of Cowdray or Cirencester for long enough, isn’t such a long shot.
The sport is a cauldron of sex, power, money and revenge
To play at the top level, you need to be fabulously rich, or from Argentina