Elephant polo
Elephant polo? I had never heard of it. Polo with horses I know, well, I know, you sometimes read about this game exclusively for people who absolutely do not know what to do with their time and money.
Because it is expensive, you have to join a polo club, a polo horse can cost more than $ 100.000, the equipment costs a small fortune and the competitions are never sponsored by a simple guesthouse, but by 5-star hotels or resorts where you are supposed to stay. Then add the costs for the (first class, of course) flight tickets up and you can enter a small village for that amount Thailand provide food and drink for a year.
Elephant polo is, if possible, even more exclusive, because it is rarely played, but the costs are certainly no less than horse polo. The game is only played in Thailand, Nepal, Sri Lanka and parts of India. The world championship takes place annually in Nepal. The elephants come into play in Thailand from the Elephant Sanctuary in Lampang, a nature reserve where elephants, made unemployed by the ban on logging, live and are well cared for.
The pachyderms are ridden during a match by their own trainer, a Mahout, and a player, who then plays the actual game, sits behind him. The aim of the game, like horse polo, is to play a small ball with a long stick with the intention of shooting it into a goal and scoring a point. That seems simple, but there are quite a few snags to the game. The game is probably the slowest ball game in the world, because elephants aren't fast. They don't gallop, they don't sprint and turning and turning also takes some time. The ball is no bigger than a tennis ball and it often happens that an elephant stands on it with his paw and the ball is simply buried. Match Interruption! A smart elephant, who has played the game before, can pick up the ball with his trunk and aim it into the goal, but that is against the rules.
In a "fight" for the ball, 2 or 3 elephants can be so close together that the ball under one of those elephants is not visible to the players. The players then have to go off to the crowd: "Hey, on the left, no man, to my left, to your right," etc. All round hilarity.
Another reason for a stoppage in competition is the elephant dung. An elephant eats an average of 80 kilos of food per day and with 6 of those animals plus the referee's elephant you have a poop potential of 560 kilos. If one or more elephants let themselves go, for example in a kind of scrum, this results in a nice pile of pollution and a player sitting on an elephant nearby does not keep his player pants clean.
The reason for this story was the King's Cup Elephant Polo Tournament, which took place in Hua Hin at the beginning of September. I wanted to report about it earlier, but because of all the flood news it didn't happen. Interesting enough, because next year there will be another tournament and a number of readers will certainly want to attend.
This tournament has been organized since 2001, so this year it was the second lustrum. Reason enough to celebrate it lavishly. But first the tournament itself. This year, 12 elite teams competed for the coveted Cup, entrants came from multiple countries, such as Mercedes of Germany, British Airways, Johnny Walker, the Kasikorn Bank, the IBM Spice Girls Team and the Anantara Resort team. The last two teams consisted entirely of ladies, with the Anantara team even using two real German princesses. The women's teams didn't make much of it, but yes, participating is more important than winning, shall we say. The Audemars Piquet Team (of the Swiss watch) won the tournament by beating the King Power Team with a Golden Goal in extra time.
The award ceremony took place on a closing night during a Gala dinner, where quite a few celebrities were present. Because who doesn't know them? The supermodels Cindy Bishop and Lookade Kingpayome, the singers Krisada Clapp and Yuyee, TAT chief, Suraphon Svetasreni, the Ambassador of Switzerland, Christine Schraner. Of course, royalty was also present in the persons of Prince Carl-Eugen, Princess Anna and Princess von Oettingen-Wallerstein. It was also a charity dinner, where more than 3 million Baht was collected that evening for the benefit of the aforementioned Lampang Elephant Reserve.