History of Polo

Polo is arguably the oldest team sport in recorded history, as the first matches are believed to have been played in Persia around 2,500 years ago. Find out how Persian literature provides the richest account of the origins of polo with help from the secretary of a polo club in this free video on the history of polo.

Hi, I'm Cyrus Confectioner, secretary of Calcutta Polo Club, one of the oldest Polo clubs in the world. I'm going to tell you in a very short brief about the origin of the sport. Polo is arguably the oldest team sport recorded in history with the first matches having being played in Persia, around two thousand five hundred years ago. Initially we thought that this was created by competing tribes of Central Asia and it was quickly taken up by the king as a method to train his cavalry. These matches would resemble a battle of up to a hundred men a side. The exact origin of the team sport is unknown but probably it was played by the nomadic warriors some two thousand years back. Some scholars also believe that the Iranian tribes, during the times of Darayus, the First had forged his cavalry to Polo, practice horse riding basically. It is from Persian literature that we get the richest accounts of Polo. In fact, a very famous poet Firdausi gives a number of accounts of royal Polo tournaments in his Ninth Century epic, Shahnameh. There were two British soldiers, Captain Stewart and Major General Shearer who visited Manipur around 1960. Manipur is a small state in the North East of India. These two soldiers when they visited, saw the locals playing a game on horseback, chasing a ball, and hitting around with a stick, very similar to the game of Hockey. They got very excited being horsemen themselves, seeing that a game was being played on horseback. When they came back to Calcutta, which obviously must have been their base at that time. And they said, why don't we make it a proper game. So they put goal posts, they decided to have four people per team. And the Calcutta Polo Club was founded, this was Sakha 1860s. The sport was then introduced to England in around 1869-1870. And seven years later, a very renowned sportsman of that time, James Gordon Bennett took the game to the United States. Over the next fifty years, Polo achieved tremendous popularity in the United States. After 1886, around that same period of time, English and American teams occasionally met for the International Polo Challenge Cup. Polo was on several Olympic Games scheduled, but as we know today, the last Polo played at the Olympics was in 1936. Today the oldest Polo clubs outside India are the Malta Polo Club founded around 1868- 1870. The All Ireland Polo Club founded in Dublin around the same time and the Monmouthshire in England, around also 1875. These are all historic clubs, it is still controversial as to the exact origins of Polo. Of course, depending on which country you are in, the exact history of Polo can definitely vary. However some parts of history remain the same, thank you.