BUENOS AIRES, April 12 (Reuters) – Among the world’s prime ladies polo gamers compete this week in Argentina within the sport’s first-ever feminine World Cup, the fruits of years of rising alternative in a recreation recognized for its equestrian attract and high-society sensibilities.
The lady’s polo World Cup obtained underneath approach final Saturday on the Cathedral stadium within the leafy Palermo neighborhood of Buenos Aires, the Argentine capital, and can conclude on April 16 after the week-long match. The competitors options groups from the house nation, the USA, Brazil, England, Italy and Eire.
“Lately, the expansion of ladies’s polo has been so spectacular,” Clara Cassino, a prime Argentine participant, advised Reuters. “Annually it grows a lot, extra so for girls’s polo than for the lads,” she added, in a nod to the addition of ladies’s tournaments in Argentina and past.
An earlier match often known as the Ladies’s Polo Open kicked off in Buenos Aires 5 years in the past with its personal participant score system, or handicap, and is held every year concurrent with a males’s match, which dates again greater than a century.
The ladies’s match is credited with inspiring related competitions in recent times in Britain and the USA as the sport has grown in recognition.
Polo, usually dubbed the game of kings, is believed to be one of many world’s oldest recognized workforce sports activities, however historically solely open to males.
It was delivered to Argentina’s sprawling plains, or pampas, by British immigrants within the late 1800s, the place it discovered a house alongside the South American nation’s iconic gaucho cowboys.
Members of ladies’s polo groups from Argentina and the USA observe on the Argentine Polo Federation, earlier than the Ladies’s Polo World Championship, in Pilar, on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, Argentina April 8, 2022. Image taken April 8, 2022. REUTERS/Agustin Marcarian
Right now, Argentina is among the many prime international locations the place polo is performed, in addition to being a serious exporter of horses specifically bred for the game.
The sport is performed with groups of 4 horse-mounted gamers who intention to attain factors by hitting a ball by way of purpose posts with lengthy picket mallets on the ends of the 300-yard-long (274-meter) grassy subject.
Fashionable polo combines high-tech improvements, together with horse cloning, with artisan-made studs, saddles and boots, and now new alternatives for girls who wish to play.
In an interview, Azucena Uranga, a 20-year-old member of the Argentine nationwide workforce, cheered the prospect to compete within the first World Cup.
“It provides us our personal place and an unbelievable alternative, one which perhaps we’ll solely absolutely understand in a number of years,” she stated.
Delfin Uranga, Azucena’s father and the president of Argentina’s polo affiliation, confused that the nation’s worldwide management within the sport is particularly vital as a result of different nations usually comply with its lead.
“It sends a message to the world,” he stated, “to present ladies a chance to compete on the similar stage as males.”
Reporting by Lucila Sigal; Writing by David Alire Garcia; Modifying by Leslie Adler
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