MEGHAULI, Nepal: “The social side is important, but on the pitch it’s serious,” Torquhil Campbell, the 13th Duke of Argyll, said as an elephant rushed past with a mallet-swinging hedge fund manager on its back.
The world may be lurching into recession, but in the jungles of southern Nepal, it’s business as usual for the eclectic bunch of jetsetters gathered for their annual festival of Pimm’s and elephant polo.
An idea thought up in a bar nearly 30 years ago in the Swiss resort of St Moritz by Nepalese tourism pioneer AV Jim Edwards and polo enthusiast James Manclark, has blossomed into a series of tournaments held in Sri Lanka, Thailand and Nepal.
The blue riband event is the World Cup held every year at a grass airstrip on the edge of Nepal’s Chitwan national park.
Based on the rules of polo, but played on elephants on a smaller field, the 20-minute matches involve teams of four players on various sized pachyderms tussling for control of the small white ball.
The game can be fast-paced, with the surprisingly sprightly elephants kicking up clouds of dust as they rush up and down the pitch, which is edged on one side by jungles where tigers and rhino roam.
“The polo stick is up to 2.4m long so it requires a lot of skill and strength to use,” said the 40-year-old duke and businessman who was competing in a team sponsored by Scottish whisky makers Chivas.
Mahouts, or elephant riders, direct the beasts with hard blows to the head and shoulders with short sticks, leaving the player to focus on whacking the wooden ball to either end of the 100-metre pitch.
Krisjan Edwards, the 38-year-old son of the sport’s founder, rejected any suggestion that the sport was cruel.
“The equivalent for a human being is having a hamster on your shoulder repeatedly hitting you with a toothpick,” said Edwards, who manages the Tiger Mountain chain of luxury jungle and mountain resorts established in the 1960s by his father.
“It doesn’t hurt them, it’s just very annoying,” said Edwards, as he watched the play at the event, which began November 30 and ends today.
This year the competition - which raises money for conservation work and charities in Nepal - has eight teams with players ranging from the expert to the total novices.
The US team, New York Blue, trained in their home town in empty car parks, clinging to the top of SUVs while swinging mallets fashioned from broom handles and plumbing parts.
“It’s hugely different than our practices,” said team member Bill Keith.
“For one thing, the sticks are much heavier than the home made ones we practiced with,” he said. The seven-member US squad of thirty-something lawyers, bankers, PR executives and journalists have learned the sport has risks for which their improvised training left them unprepared.
“Our defender Chip took a whack in the side of the head with a mallet and got a golf-ball sized lump,” said Keith.
Hundreds of local villagers gathered to watch the play on Wednesday, setting up peanut and fried noodle stalls opposite the bar where the players were enjoying drinks in the highly-encouraged social aspect of the competition.
“It’s a lot of fun to see, and it brings tourists and money to the area so locals get to benefit,” said Jit Bahadur Mahato, a 45-year-old farmer.
Nepal’s economy is largely unconnected to the financial turmoil that has hit worldwide, but the ripples of the downturn are beginning to be felt at the elephant polo, where corporate sponsors pay tens of thousands of dollars to take part.
“I heard a sponsor did pull out,” said Jason Wheeller, whose 10-member Pukka Chukkas team is raising money for multiple sclerosis charities in Britain and Australia.
“They could not be seen sponsoring elephant polo while they were struggling to stay afloat,” said Wheeller, 43, who works in oil and gas risk assessment in London.
New York Blue team member Jeff Bollerman had an optimistic take on the downturn.
“There is about to be an oversupply of very frivolous people with lots of time on their hands, so from that perspective, I think the sport has a great future,” said the 34-year-old banker.–AFP
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