The sport of kings is having a moment — it’s the subject of Harry and Meghan’s new Netflix documentary and hot Argentinian players are now arriving in Britain for the start of the season. Malcolm Borwick, former England captain and the polo-playing chum of the Duke of Sussex, puts Sophia Money-Coutts in the saddle.
I have just had a polo lesson with Malcolm Borwick, former England captain and polo-playing friend of Prince Harry, and now there’s an ambulance at the Sussex stables with two paramedics having a look for broken ribs.
They’re not checking me, I should clarify. They’re feeling up one of Malcolm’s clients. People pay this tall, blue-eyed, intensely charming character, who could be from one of Polo writer Jilly Cooper’s novels, £250 (about $520) an hour for lessons, and this poor chap was practising on one of the polo fields behind us (or stick and balling, as they call it, but we’ll come to the lingo later) when, bang, suddenly he was on the ground, not moving. Malcolm, like a real-life action hero, leapt off his horse as if the saddle had electrocuted his arse and sprinted over; there followed several minutes of agonised groaning. Then the ambulance was called. But as Malcolm tells me later, this is a dangerous game.
The polo season’s just kicked off in the UK, having finished in America where last month Malcolm played alongside Prince Harry in Florida. There, he captained the winning side and afterwards launched a viral TikTok clip and a thousand mischievous news articles after he kissed the Duchess of Sussex. It was classic Prince Harry tomfoolery — after collecting the winning trophy, Malcolm kissed Meghan on both cheeks, whereupon Harry flexed his shoulders and pulled a face. “I didn’t even see that,” Malcolm says, which I’m not sure can be entirely true because he knows exactly what clip I’m referring to but, like I said, he does have very blue eyes and a charming manner, so I’m willing to let that one slide. “I don’t do clickbaiting,” Malcolm adds firmly.
The game is about to have a moment, as they say. Not just because it’s polo season in the UK and glamorous socialites are flocking to polo clubs in Windsor and Gloucestershire to drink champagne and pretend they understand what’s going on in front of them. Not because a Jilly Cooper adaptation is shortly to land on TV either, but because a new Netflix documentary about polo is in the works. It will follow the American polo season, with a behind-the-scenes look at the sport that’s often called elitist, inaccessible and the most expensive hobby in the world. It’s the sport of kings, after all, where the best horses can fetch £200,000 and to bankroll a top team you ideally need the petty cash reserves of Jeff Bezos.
Who are the executive producers of this show, which is going to show us what an egalitarian and intrepid pastime polo really is? A couple called the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. “Known primarily for its aesthetic and social scene, the series will pull back the curtain on the grit and passion of the sport, capturing players and all it takes to compete at the highest level,” declared Netflix when Harry and Meghan’s project was announced last month.
Malcolm will feature; the day he played in Florida alongside Harry was filmed. But he won’t tell me much more. Nor will he spill much about Harry and Meghan. He’s one of those loyal, clipped British sorts who’s in their inner circle and won’t talk.
He will talk, almost exhaustively, about polo, his 50-plus England caps, why its popularity is soaring again and how you can genuinely play the sport if you’re merely “a blacksmith with a horse”. He also shows me where to find a horse’s erogenous zone, which is exciting, but before then I have to get through my lesson.
First, an admission that will shock precisely no one: I grew up watching polo. I lived about 16 kilometres from the Sussex stables where Malcolm and I meet, in this beautiful, green and moneyed patch of the countryside. Polo is big here because Cowdray Park, the 16,000-acre estate that hosts one of the biggest polo competitions, the Gold Cup, is close by. At this time of year, the narrow lanes are full of men in gaucho hats exercising horses, and the pubs are full of Spanish chitchat because a vast number of Argentinians follow the polo season around the world: from America at the start of the calendar year, to the UK for our summer, to Sotogrande in southern Spain for August, and from there to the polo capital, Argentina.
On weekday afternoons when I was small, Mum used to pick up my brother and me from school and we would go to Cowdray. Some kids get taken to the football terraces; we went to the polo, where my bro and I played with our mini polo sticks behind the grandstand. Unbearable, I know, but I’ve picked up a bit about the game as a result. They’re not horses, for example. The correct term is ponies. Chukkas are the seven-minute segments that make up a game. The worst handicap is -2 and the best is 10, and there are only nine 10-goal players in the world. Mostly Argentinian. All men.
I’ve sat on a polo pony once before, but I’ve never had a lesson. So here I am, on a £30,000 chestnut mare called Habana, being schooled by a former England captain. Reins in my left hand; polo stick in my right. It doesn’t look much, that sliver of bamboo and tipa wood, but let me tell you, after you’ve swung it behind you two dozen times in a pathetic attempt to hit a ball the size of a grapefruit, your shoulder will feel it. “Turn your left shoulder towards it,” barks Malcolm, riding alongside me, as I raise the stick in the air yet again. “I’ve got a dodgy hip,” I mumble. But Malcolm isn’t the sort of teacher who listens to excuses. He comes from a Scottish military family and he takes the sergeant-major approach. “Get your heels down!” he shouts, when I try to hit the ball at a canter.
Poor Habana, I worry, this can’t be good for her back. I miss it, then I miss it again, and this continues for some time as my right wrist starts to scream. But then something miraculous happens: I hit the ball, it makes an immensely satisfying “Thunk!” sound, and soars ahead of me on the playing field. I feel invincible.
Then comes the dramatic fall of Malcolm’s client, Tom, behind us and the action is paused. It’s quite Jilly Cooper all of a sudden: Clare, the Marchioness of Milford Haven, who owns these stables where Malcolm keeps his ponies, is on the phone directing the ambulance. Tom, in a pink polo shirt, is wondering around asking what day it is. My thighs, meanwhile, are wobbling like blancmange from my lesson.
In between all this drama, Malcolm keeps talking to me about the game. He comes from a posh riding family (his grandmother also played polo for Engand), and started playing polo for the Pony Club when he was 10. By the age of 14, he’d launched the polo club at Radley College. After school, he travelled to Argentina with his savings. “I went to an Argentinian pro and said, ‘Here’s £6000. How long can I stay?’” He remained in Argentina for three months, finessing his polo and working as a groom when the cash ran out.
Tall and rangy, Malcolm was naturally good at various sports. But, for him, nothing could match the speed and adrenaline of polo. He played throughout university, winning the Universities Championship three years in a row. How did he fund this expensive habit? “I wasn’t the kid who had parents who bought six ponies and said, ‘Here you go, darling, play!’” he tells me.
Instead, while at Durham (studying psychology and then Spanish, which he tacked on to his degree so he could understand the Argentinian polo players), he started developing his business acumen, hustling businesses such as Maserati and Japan Airlines, pitching polo as an aspirational sport worth sponsoring. He was persuasive (and charming), so they listened. By that stage, he was also good enough that he was being called up by teams owned by the likes of Nigerian prince Albert Esiri and British businessman Adrian Kirby, so he played all over the globe for three years after university.
At 24, he was offered a finance role in Singapore, having decided that he needed a “proper” job, but he got the England call-up the same day. How long did he grapple with that decision? “About two seconds.”
We pause as Tom reappears to say the paramedics have checked him over. “It’s only mild concussion and they say I can drive,” he tells us. Malcolm frowns and suggests Tom take a couple more painkillers before getting into his Range Rover.
Tom totters off again and we return to polo. Malcolm, now 47, played for England for a decade at the same time as various international club teams, travelling around the world — from Australia to Korea and India — with his girlfriend, Alexandra, who became his wife, and their growing family. He’s played “many times” alongside Princes William and Harry and schools me in their differences. “Harry is an offensive polo player, a very positive, very forward-thinking player, whereas William is a really solid defensive player.” I see, I say, wondering whether this echoes their characters in real life, but Malcolm doesn’t elaborate.
All right, fine. But was this scene as deeply glamorous and louche as people might imagine?
No, he insists. “When I started playing professionally, after Durham in the Noughties, that was the first time it wasn’t acceptable to fall out of a nightclub at 2am and get up and play. I was at the forefront of the very first team to have a personal trainer, the very first team that had a psychologist, the very first team that looked at nutrition.” As a younger player, he was once told off for going to bed before the boss of the team, but he says all that has since changed.
What was originally a military training game subsequently adopted by Persian nobles two millennia ago was picked up with enthusiasm by the British army in the 19th century, and spread around the Empire. It morphed into an aristocratic game because you needed cash and horses to play it, and from there developed the idea that polo was played exclusively by hard-shagging, hard-drinking toffs and princes. Think of Princess Diana standing by the sidelines in the Nineties watching her husband. I still laugh (tragically) whenever I think about a Tatler cover from 1992, featuring the future king in polo kit with the line, “Is Prince Charles too sexy for his own good?”
Now, Malcolm says, it’s a more professional game, taken extremely seriously by players who — like him — do Pilates or yoga every day and study their macronutrients. One of his business collaborations is with the whisky brand Royal Salute, and he now plays for his Royal Salute team with a handicap of 5 — so still a very, very good player — while juggling various business interests and coaching private clients like poor old Tom.
Imagine Sir Alan Sugar but instead he sounds posh and he’s obsessed with polo. Malcolm comes across a bit like that. He has “equestrian real estate” projects in Saudi Arabia, Dubai, Spain and Portugal, he has his whisky collaboration, and he dabbles in breeding polo ponies. Because he’s a polo wheeler-dealer, he’s also helping to develop a smaller, faster version of the game — Gladiator polo — played with a team of three instead of four, on a field that’s roughly half the size. Much as other sports are trying to attract younger fans — think cricket and Twenty20 — so too is polo.
He says polo’s popularity has waned slightly in the UK after the late Noughties and what Malcolm calls “the Katie Price era”, when the big summer competitions were attended by people who simply wanted to be seen, but he’s optimistic about the game going forward. “Let’s take it away from Cartier and Jaeger-LeCoultre and make it Budweiser,” he says, before explaining that he’s also trying to create a rollout surface: “an Astro base that you could roll out in the middle of Manhattan”. He reckons this will shore up the future of polo and make it more accessible. He talks proudly of more women playing the game. “I’m a huge believer in reaching out to the next generation, and with the Netflix documentary, we’ll get that message across. Polo is always going to have a barrier, but we want to try to reduce it.” Oh, so he’s more involved in Harry and Meghan’s documentary than he is letting on? Again, no dice. Malcolm’s too proper for that.
His three children — Ines, 13, Jaime, 12, and Lucas, 10 — have started playing, which makes him “nervous”. “Remember that scene in Gone with the Wind, the father pushing the daughter to ride?”
And she dies, I say cautiously.
“Exactly. I run the risk of putting my children into a sport that is extremely dangerous. Look at today,” he says, gesturing to the yard where the ambulance has gone but Tom is still staggering around.
One lesson was probably enough for me, although Malcolm says it takes six lessons to know if you’ve caught the polo bug. It might make a nice change from Pilates because you can burn up to 1800 calories in a match, he adds.
Oh, and if you’re interested, the horse’s erogenous zone is on its shoulder, just below the bottom of its mane. He demonstrates on one of his, a mare called Lolita, and she turns her neck to reciprocate by nuzzling his arm. Like I said, he’s very charming, whether you’re a human or a horse. Sorry, pony.
Written by: Sophia Money-Coutts
© The Times of London
