POLO magazine 2016 | Page 82

L AST WOR D AN OLYMPIC POLO LESSON hen you have a moment between the regular demands of attending the polo – refilling your champagne, trying to work out how JoAnn Strauss got into that magnificent dress, wondering if it’s possible to hot-wire the dazzling BMW i8 outside the marquee (and could you outrun the police to the Mozambican border?) – have a look down onto the field. The professional polo match that’s playing out as a soothing backdrop to your glamorous Sunday is a glorious symphony of man and horse, a perfect piece of sporting theatre that looks awfully quick, and just a little dangerous – but not all that difficult, really. The horses are clearly doing most of the work, swinging Victor Matfield’s oversized croquet mallet looks pretty straightforward, and the goal you’re aiming for is roughly the size of Malawi. At the risk of offending the Jilly Cooper extras charging up and down the field in their ‘80s white jeans two sizes too small, anyone could play polo… …until anyone tries to play polo and then you discover it’s monumentally, ridiculously, impossibly difficult. I’ve done some silly things for my television show. I’ve skied down the wrong side of a mountain in Switzerland with Mike Horne, a man who makes Steve Irwin look sensible and measured. I’ve swum with Cameron van der Burgh in the Zambezi, coming to a halt metres before the 82 BMW INTERNATIONAL POLO ‘In my silken hands, a pony (as one must call them – ‘donkeys’ is frowned upon, apparently) has the turning circle of a combine harvester, and the handling of a 16-year-old having his first driving lesson.’ river tumbles over a cliff and becomes the Victoria Falls. And I’ve clung terrified to the back of a BMW superbike hurtling round a track at 240 kilometres an hour, screaming with all the tough bravado of the front row at a One Direction concert. And so getting onto a horse and knocking a ball around a field for an hour seemed like a very mild afternoon out in comparison. The venue was Val de Vie, the home of polo in Cape Town, which is also home to Olympic swimmer Ryk Neethling, who’d arranged my polo introduction with a quiet smile I should have read into more. Ryk is a good mate of mine, and there is nothing good friends like more than to see each other being greatly embarrassed in public… Ryk is a blonde-fringed block of chiselled granite; standing next to him, it’s impossible not to feel like Danny DeVito to his Arnold Schwarzenegger in Twins. That image extends, sadly, when he swings effortlessly onto a horse, while you in turn end up being shoved onto your saddle by two stable hands trying their best not to laugh. But it’s once you’re on your horse that the true challenge of polo unfolds. The video footage is buried somewhere in a dark corner of the Internet, but here’s a summary of the challenges inherent to your first skirmish with the sport of kings. In my silken hands, a pony (as one must call them – ‘donkeys’ is frowned upon, apparently) has the turning circle of a combine harvester, and the handling of a 16-year-old having his first driving lesson. The ball is never in the slightest danger of being hit by the awkwardly swinging broomstick in your hand, and as for the wide open goals suddenly shrinking… In my defence, I did manage a few half-decent strikes, although most were drowned out by the sound of Ryk chuckling in the background. (He’s now officially my least favourite gold medal-winning Olympian.) At one point I even managed a goal; that I was three feet away is entirely irrelevant. But when I fell off my pony for a third time, and trudged off to find solace in the bar, I accepted the fact that it’s all rather more difficult that it looks. Refill your champagne, then admire Jo-Ann and the cars in equal measure, and accept my experienced opinion: polo is a wonderful sport, just as long as you don’t actually try to play it. ■ Dan Nicholl is a BMW ambassador; catch The Dan Nicholl Show on Wednesday nights at 7pm on SuperSport 1. PHOTOGRAPH: SUPPLIED How difficult can the game of polo be? Ridiculously, impossibly difficult as Dan Nicholl discovers.