The Ride of my Life

eing a polar explorer and playing polo have little in common other than a shared fi rst syllable. Inspect them more closely, though, and there are several common strands: they are both heinously expensive, more than a little dangerous, are pursued by a small coterie of the clinically insane and can easily become an overriding obsession.

Some say that you don’t play polo – you have it, like polio. It’s hard to get rid of, it consumes you. Captain Robert Scott, Sir Ernest Shackleton and Roald Amundsen – the preeminent of the golden age of Antarctic explorers – would have said the same about the ice. Once they had witnessed the magnetic allure of the Pole, they were doomed forever to return and were never truly happy in civilisation again. For those who have played polo, no other sport, no other adrenalin rush, comes close.

Kicking the polo-habit a few years ago, after it had burned a hole in my pocket too big to sew up, meant there was a cold-turkey urge to replace it with something else. And, so, I developed a passion to go to Antarctica.

As the desire to go to the remotest, windiest, highest and coldest continent on earth burgeoned, a few other factors conspired to lead me to a decision to leave my job as a cityboy and spend the next two years fund-raising for a recordbreaking attempt to traverse the Antarctic continent by ski and kite-surf. A close f riend, Alex Roberts-Miller had died in a senseless tragedy and I met the charismatic Patrick Woodhead, 29, who had recently returned f rom the South Pole and who inspired me with a wealth of tales, footage, photographs and enthusiasm.

Soon, Patrick and I had formulated a truly madcap plan, including strands f rom the adventures of both Amundsen and Shackleton, that was dedicated to the memory of Alex. Two teams would approach the South Pole f rom either side of the continent. One team would ski, hauling its loads, following the route of Amundsen – untravelled in the 94 years since he became the fi rst man to stand at the South Pole – and once at the Pole would use the prevailing North wind to kite-surf back. e second team would drive to the Pole in specially modifi ed Land Rovers, resupply the skiteam there, and then fi lm its audacious kiting return.

As time progressed and Patrick and I had started to build up an impressive list of sponsors, including Invesco Perpetual, Dunhill and Nikon, we turned our attention to putting together a team that would be able to withstand the rigours of the expedition but still do it with panache and humour.

Who would be willing to race at adrenalin-pumping speed over a pock-marked surface and risk life and limb if they hit the ground? Well, there was no question – it had to be a polo player.

So we approached David de Rothschild, a f riend of Patrick’s sister. David had played polo for a number of years, is Jack Kidd’s best f riend and now breeds and trains polo ponies f rom his home in Hertfordshire. He leapt at the chance. What a shame he wasn’t our patron too.

Polo teams have four players. e formation is invariable; fi rst a goal-hungry Number One. As the founder of the project and hungry for the success of the team but without the experience and skill of the other guys, this became my position in our polar line up.

Patrick, with his past Antarctic experience, dynamism, skill and carrying a large portion of the workload, would suit the harrying and manoeuvring of a Number Two.

David is a giant of a man. Six foot fi ve and 100 kilos. He

Previous page: Alastair Vere Nicoll treks towards the South Pole from the New Zealand side

has an incredible sense of humour and is ever-dependable. Given he spends much of his time in New Zealand, he reminded me of a rangy Cody Forsyth. Number Four.

All that was left was to fi nd Carlos Gracida. We needed a play-maker, someone with experience, age and common-sense to rein in our young team. If we were to pull off one of the most ambitious polar expeditions of recent times, we required a ten-goaler, someone of serious quality, the most accomplished polar explorer in the world: Paul Landry, 49. He’s the sort of player who arrives at a polo game in a helicopter, not a fast car. We’d have to pay big bucks to secure him for the season. We already knew of another team wanting his services. With him as our Number ree, we couldn’t lose. He could do things in that white landscape that no one else could. He’d been to the North Pole three times and the South Pole twice, had lived in the high Arctic, ran Canadian eskimo dogs for a living and had a face as ravaged and time-worn as Kerry Packer’s. e wives and husbands of polo-players aren’t always tolerant of the pursuits of their other halves. ey are forced to look glamorous on the sidelines, have to watch the lucre leach away into the bottom of a horse’s oat-trough and endure a constant diet of cucumber sandwiches and champagne without the camaraderie of the team or the adulation and attention. Perhaps they even feel, at times, as if polo might even be more important than they are. Well, my wife, Annabel, can certainly sympathise.

Our baby was due on January 15, 2005 – the precise date that, if everything went smoothly, our expedition was scheduled to return f rom the ice. Oh Lord. To go or not to go? Could I bear to watch, emasculated, f rom the clubhouse, while another eager two-goaler rode my horses, profi ted f rom all my hard work and played in the ultimate high-goal tournament? Could I bear to miss the birth? If I obsessed too much about a silly, ego-centric, male-dominated pursuit maybe my wife would resent me forever. It had to be Annabel’s decision. At 31, I don’t think she expected I’d be going through my mid-life crisis so early. In the end, she decided, that I’d be more insuff erable

Patrick Woodhead is transported through a blizzard by winds of up to 30 knots. His sledge weighed almost 200 pounds

if I stayed behind than if I went. Good girl. e game itself was a high-drama, eight chukka (plus extra-time) knuckle-biter worthy of the Argentine Open. e opposition – Antarctica – was high quality. We arrived on November 1, 2004 – on windswept blue ice, in a cargo plane chartered f rom Kazakhstan and fl own by a battle-hardened team who had fl own together in the Soviet army and who celebrated each successful landing with a bottle of vodka. We were greeted by the worst weather for 15 years. Stuck for a fortnight on the ice before we could even start the traverse, soft snow piled onto the usually hard landscape. My hopes of returning for the birth faded. Antarctica 1 us, 0.

We came out for the second chukka in a more determined mood and managed to take advantage of clearer weather to fl y across the continent to the Ross Ice Shelf on the New Zealand side and commenced our expedition by climbing Mount Betty, fi nding on the summit a cairn built 94 years earlier by Roald Amundsen. Scores level.

Over the next 20 days we heaved, pulled, tugged and sweated our way up the Axel Heiberg glacier – the fi rst men to do so without dogs – pulling our loads with two men per sled, so deep was the snow, and then returning in our tracks to lug up the second one. e huge Amundsen Icefall, a tumbling f rozen cataract of ice, blocked our path. We zig-zagged through a maze of massive crevasses. Finally, at the top of the glacier and wheezing f rom the altitude, we got stuck in a blizzard of over 80km per hour for three days. David, who hurt his knee on the icefall, was threatened with evacuation. e very next day I got bad f rostbite on my foot. It was my turn to face substitution. David and I looked I

Above (l to r): Alastair, Paul Landry and David de Rothschild. Right: David prepares for polo action in warmer climes the spectre of h u m i l i a t i n g withdrawal fi rmly in the face. We were tired, injured and very much behind time with our rations. Temperatures of around minus 35 (without wind-chill) and severe headwinds further pressed us into our own goalmouth. We now heard that the Land Rover team and fi lm crew, over on the other side of Antarctica, had got stuck in the unseasonally deep snow and were being evacuated. So, with no rations being brought to the South Pole, we had no hope of completing the journey. Our team was down and almost out. At our most debilitated and having run out of funds, we had to negotiate for an airdrop to bring the rations that were going to be brought by the Land Rovers to the South Pole. I managed to stave off infection Father and child reunion: Alastair and his daughter, Lily G AY Y O UN ND S L in my f rostbitten hoof. David’s knee, without the hard climbing of the glacier, started to improve. e bitter wind dropped a few knots and now, at an altitude above the South Pole, we started to fi ght back. We fi nally arrived at the South Pole 52 days after arriving in Antarctica (and 37 days after starting the expedition).

It was now time to reveal our secret weapon – huge, powerful, bucking kites. ey were the equivalent, for our beleaguered team, of getting onto steroid-pumped bronco horses. Provided we could stay on (and we frequently didn’t) they could propel us ahead at phenomenal speed. In polo, you are frequently required to hold four reins and a whip in a single hand. Now we had many hundreds of kite-lines all converging, designed especially by Flexifoil to hold the polar winds – the strongest in the world.

So far we had made only 600 kilometres but now, wind-assisted, we charged forward, kiting whenever the wind was good, night or day, and made the remaining 1,100 klicks in only 18 days. ere were many tussles with the sastrugi, blizzards, ice and crevasses of our opposition, including a very scary episode where David was left hanging f rom his armpits over a bottomless blue-ice abyss,. But, eventually, we reached the end of the continent, to claim the match, at 11.30 GMT on January 12, 2005.

We became the quickest team to trek f rom the edge of Antarctica to the South Pole and the fi rst to follow Amundsen’s route. We were also the fastest to traverse the continent and the fi rst to do it f rom the New Zealand side. David, at the age of 26, became the youngest Briton and Paul the fi rst Canadian to traverse Antarctica.

I still had one amazing experience in store, though. e most surreal, gut-wrenching, happy-sad moment of my life.

Half an hour after completing our traverse, I called on satellite phone to the operating theatre of the Kingsbury hospital and listened to my incredible wife give birth to our daughter, Lily, and heard her screams for the fi rst time f rom my tent on the sea-ice, miles f rom anywhere. Gutted not to be there, all the emotions of the last 76 days on the ice, the strain of the last two and a half years of planning and the joy of fatherhood all fl ooded out of me. Who said polo players don’t cry? Some things are simply more important than sport. ■