Polo & More, Singapore 2017 Polo & More, Singapore 2017 | Page 16

Another first was an all-women’s team entering and winning the UK’s prestigious Gerald Balding Trophy in 2007, comprising Nina, her sister Tamara Vestey, Lucy Taylor and Clare’s daughter Emma Tomlinson. Nina Clarkin is currently the UK’s highest handicapped female player off 4 goals, she belongs to a very exclusive club in the UK and worldwide; the one of women with Plus handicaps. She invokes “Of over 700 women playing in England, about 15 of these have a handicap of 1 or above and only about half a dozen are rated at 2. Whether we like it or not, women are not physiologically the same as men and will always struggle to compete on the same level. Polo is the only contact sport where men and women compete against each other. This is great, but comes with obvious limitations. There are women who overcome these limitations and push up the ranks, but they are the few rather than the many.” Whilst Clare, Lavinia and Nina provided examples of excellence for women players in the 80s, Pippa Gillard (nee Grace) set out to broaden the sports grass roots appeal to women, first nationally, then worldwide. Daughter of the late coaching legend Peter Grace, OBE, like him she has done much to popularize polo in the UK and worldwide. She and her three sisters were dubbed the ‘Four Graces’ by the UK press and their family, all female team garnered much publicity for women in polo. “I set up universities polo in the UK in 1984-85 and played for Oxford. When I started playing in the UK, there were only 40 women players, but by 1997, this had increased to 400, 10% of the UK playing HPA membership. She paved the way for all-women polo competitions, worldwide, with the foundation of the International Women’s Polo Association in 1997. A serious advocate for the game who has worked diligently over the last 20 odd years to bring the women’s game into the limelight – the IWPA now has established women’s tournaments world-wide, that mix up and coming local female players with the international stars who are their inspiration. On the other side of the Atlantic, the birth of women’s polo was heralded with a New York Times headline in 1910 titled “Women Play Polo…… cause sensation!” Women began to play regularly in the US during the 1920s. According to the USPA, “Most women’s polo was played on private fields it was not until a 1923 match at Squadron A in New York that the first public tournament among women took place.” Horace Laffaye recounts how Pansey Ireland ‘used her initials in order to be listed as the first ever women player in the USPA year book, to obtain a handicap rating in 1925….”when the ruse was discovered, her name was erased.” In 1933, a woman player called Dorothy Wheeler started the US Women’s Polo Association, but USPA officials refused to officially recognise her organisation, on the grounds that “polo is not a woman’s game.” A pl