Polo, the sport of ....er....Farmers - by John

A few days ago we went to see our first Polo game. A friend of ours from church belongs to a local team and we thought it would be fun to get out to the country and see the horses run. My preconceptions around Polo have been formed by media coverage of the British royal family and the people who wear a certain brand of golf shirt, so frankly I didn’t have any clue about what we were going to see.

It turns out that because of the economics of horse ownership in Zambia (as it was explained to me), you don’t have to be a zillionaire to play Polo, you just have to be farmer. So, instead of the mink and manure set of people with very refined English accents and more pedigrees than the horses they were riding, we watched a bunch of rough and ready white Zambian and ex-Zimbabwean farmers, with a couple of South Africans thrown in for good measure, riding local ponies and whooping it up.

Going over the boards, Polo style

What a game! The action was fast and furious, the horses were aggressive and amazingly fast, and the players were not averse to some serious jostling, often at full gallop and while swinging a very long mallet. It was pretty thrilling to watch all eight players and two referees galloping past amid the thunder of hoofbeats. Half the fun was the fans, screaming support and offering scathing and hilarious criticism of the on-field action, often at the expense of their spouses. Everyone was very friendly, a player on one team asked if we were “horse people”. I said “I can recognize a horse at a fair distance” and he said “Great, come out to practice next week”. I think I will spare the horses that kind of suffering. In the end, “our” team, the Lilay Lodge beat the team from Mazabuka by 13-12, hurrah.

Everyone after the ball!

I just had to throw in this next picture. I went for a bike ride and luckily I had my camera along. I just don’t know what to think and can come up with no reasonable explanation, other than to think that western history isn’t a subject that gets a lot of attention here.

And they serve what?