P O L O I N T H E PA M PA S
At the top Delfín Uranga takes reins as AAP President By Lucas Noel • Photos by Sergio Llamera
The new president of the AAP succeeds Eduardo Novillo Astrada and is committed to two management pillars: internationalize the game and professionalize the digitization of the polo experience in Argentina. Little by little, Delfín Uranga is getting used to the most important desk at the headquarters of the Argentine Polo Association in Palermo. That same chair was occupied by his father Marcos and his father-in-law Gonzalo Tanoira. Feeling comfortable in this room comes naturally to him. Speaking with him on his 48th birthday, he knows he has a challenge ahead of him that he always longed for: to continue his family legacy.
Like his father, Delfín Uranga assumed the AAP presidency at 47 years old.
“Both, my father and my mother have been involved with the polo management. In my house that air was always breathed. I, for my part, led the Christian Polo Family Movement and the Polo Horse Breeders Association. It was logical then to come to the polo association and contribute time and skills to a sport that I love. It is a sport, but it is also an industry. It is very gratifying to be able to generate employment in a country with such a complicated situation of poverty as Argentina is going through.
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That altruism transcends the sport. And that this service is demanded by the world, to be able to export knowledge and talent, is a huge opportunity,” enthuses the new president of the AAP. Bearing in mind that you were vice president of the last administration, which items do you want to deepen and which do you want to innovate? With Eduardo [Novillo Astrada] we agreed on something very important: that more people play, watch and sponsor polo. We shared that vision and perhaps we were a little different in the ways. But it is also good to be a multidisciplinary team with different ways of approaching issues. This sum of different points of view enriches the final product. We still had some things to do, many of them related to the internationalization of sport. Today, the pandemic slowed us down a bit, but there is a very great opportunity to work with all the countries together, especially with the United States. We have a very natural link between Argentina and the United States, being on the same continent, on the same axis. I lived in the United States for three years, played there, studied there and we developed the polo team at the University of Santa Barbara. I believe in that opportunity, in the possibility that projects, such as the AAP’s Polo University, offer, where we create a teaching methodology, a language to unify and simplify the way in which we explain the sport. Sometimes, a player does things by inertia that he cannot explain. And for this you have to create a simple language so that people who do not know about the sport can understand it. The digitization of our proposal and the international projection are the two items on which I want to work and deepen my management. How do you unify the needs and realities of the different associations around the world? I think that all the associations on the planet agree that we want more people to watch it, play it and sponsor it. What we lack is a global agenda for sharing practices in order to achieve that goal.
