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hurlingham [special report]
duty calls The game’s proud tradition among the army’s officer corps can only be boosted now that Prince William and Prince Harry have fallen into line WORDS ADAM EDWARDS
The army is chuffed. A new generation of senior royals has chosen an assault rifle in preference to an aircraft carrier. Princes William and Harry both opted for square-bashing over sea legs, Sandhurst rather than Dartmouth. They have not followed their grandfather, father or uncle into the dark blue of the navy. Instead, they have linked up with younger fashionable army officers, men like Captain Mark Dollar and Lieutenant Ben Vestey, who have fought with guns on the front line and battled with mallets on the polo field. The army loves polo. The game belongs to it and it belongs to the game. There’s no other profession or trade in Britain that so clearly identifies itself with a single sport, with the possible exception of clergymen and croquet. ‘There is something very special about horse sports: they deliver good officers,’ says Major General Arthur Denaro, a Gulf War veteran, and current president of the Army Polo Association. ‘Polo requires a quick eye, quick reactions, the ability to think laterally
and to get stuck in. Galloping flat out with a ball requires considerable bravery. Good polo players tend to make good officers.’ He is not the first to conclude that if you can hit a small ball with a long stick as you perch on a leather bag of bones that twists and turns like a lap dancer, then enemy insurgents are a mere bagatelle. Mark Dollar, for example, a captain in the Blues and Royals who served in Bosnia and is now secretary of the Army Polo Association, joined the army not just because he didn’t want a desk job. He wanted the thrill and excitement of soldiering but polo also played its part in his decision. ‘It was a choice between a helicopter or cavalry regiment,’ he said. ‘I decided to join a regiment with which I shared values. I’d played polo at Windsor all my life and it helped that the Blues and Royals were based there.’ Polo has always been army. It is arguably the oldest recorded team sport in history, with the first matches played in Persia over 2,500 years ago as training for the king’s cavalry.
Royal moves (above) Princes William and Harry both chose the army over the navy, learning to master guns alongside mallets on the polo field Lead on (opposite page, top) A young Winston Churchill played polo as a cavalry officer, often writing to his mother begging her for money to buy ponies Charge (opposite page, below) Major General Arthur Denaro, pictured in a tank during the Gulf War, led 58 tanks into Iraq – and also made it his duty to revive the game of polo for the military
CORBIS; EMPICS
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