Polo in England is at an all-time high, Argentina is hosting its own tournaments and inviting foreign patrons to “come on down”, new fields have been added to the Sotogrande polo community and Dubai is attracting international attention with a
serious of tournaments and high goal players from all over the world. The United States, however, has seen its polo base erode for the past forty years. The Association no longer promotes international competition and there is a move to lower the handicap limit of the U. S. Open to 22-goals.
As if things weren’t bad enough, Adolfo Cambiaso and Gonzalo Pieres will be promoting their Argentine Polo Tour that will directly compete with Wellington’s high-goal format and a professional polo league is being formed that will enlist the balance of our high-goal players.
Is this the end of high-goal polo in America? It’s too early to tell, but the results of September’s USPA meetings in Virginia will give us a good indication.
There was a time when despite its numbers, America was creating a growing system of building young players who would graduate into the high-goal ranks. Mike Carney, Heath Manning, the Sieber brothers, the Wigdahls, the Armstrongs, the Bostwicks, the Fortugnos, and then it slowed to a stop. Was it the importation of Argentine players, maybe, but that didn’t stop the growth of young American polo players in the 1980s. What’s the answer, I’m not sure, but then I don’t have a job that pays me to do nothing all year long but try to figure it out and make the changes.
If you go to the USPA website you’ll find that the Executive Director is charged with growing the game. There is a staff of nine full-time employees who are in place to support these efforts, and an additional eight full-time employees of the Polo Training Foundation, yet we see our membership eroding and the level of competition being lowered.
Considered the world polo power until the mantle was take from us by the Argentines, we are now not even the top-rated polo power in North America. Mexico has held the Camacho Cup since 1976 and Canada eliminated our US team from FIP World Cup competition last year. The once coveted Westchester Cup (U.S. vs. Great Britain) has been sitting in England since 1997, and a half-hearted effort by the Museum of Polo (the USPA would have nothing to do with helping to organize or stage it) to play the Cup in January 2009 fell apart, as no sponsorship could be found to subsidize the event, and the USPA didn’t look upon the event as important enough to dig into the millions of dollars Properties has supplied it with to carry it out.
If a handful of powerful patrons can dictate the level of the Open today, we can only expect that cap to be lowered as their skills diminish but their desire to compete in the “Open” remain.
Is this the end of high goal polo in America, I’m not sure, but I don’t like the direction in which it is going.
1 Comment
th000000907am08, 72008vUTC09bUTCSun, 07 Sep 2008 08:32:04 +0000 11, 2007 at 08:46p09
I guess one of two things is fairly evident here…
Either noone gives a s***, or they actually do and are fearful of voicing their respective opinions.
Ashame really, as our country’ polo continues to shrink we watch other country’ begininng to flourish.
And yet noone has a comment?
Maybe people are afraid to give backhander any legitimacy by commenting. They don’t realize it already has that because of the questions it asks and the comments it makes.