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FIP for purpose Herbert Spencer reflects upon the progress made during the first 25 years of polo’s international governing body
For its first century and more as a modern sport, polo was without any worldwide organisation such as cricket, rugby and football had. The nearest thing to an international body was the Polo Committee of London’s Hurlingham Club and then its successor, the Hurlingham Polo Association (HPA). The majority of polo-playing countries around the world – those of the British Empire and later the Commonwealth, from Australia to South Africa to Barbados – were affiliated to Hurlingham, participating in its councils and playing under its rules. Then along came one Marcos Uranga, an officer of the Argentine polo association, with a vision for a more all-inclusive global body. With the help of other like-minded
internationalists, his dream became a reality, and in 2007 the Federation of International Polo (FIP) celebrated its Silver Jubilee in Buenos Aires where FIP had been born a quarter-century earlier. The year 1982 was not the most auspicious one for the birth of a polo federation that chose Buenos Aires as its headquarters and an Argentine, Uranga, as its first president. The Falklands War between Argentina and the United Kingdom, with almost 3,000 casualties including some 900 dead, had ended less than six months before the first organising meeting of the FIP in the Argentine capital in the autumn of that year. Because of the conflict, the HPA had banned Argentine polo players from
competing on British soil and neither the HPA nor the national associations of other members of the British Commonwealth were prepared to join FIP in the beginning. So the federation came into being with only 11 member countries. But, as Uranga says, ‘It depends on how you view life: was our glass at the start half empty or half full?’ Today, after 25 years under presidents Uranga, then Glen Holden of the US and now Patrick Guerrand-Hermès of France, the FIP glass is brimming with a heady blend of more than 80 nations, a well-established World Championship, scores of volunteer ‘Ambassadors’ who promote the growth of polo around the globe and recognition by the International Olympic Committee
