General · EdgepediaSeptember 17, 20267 min read

Polo

Polo is a team equestrian sport in which riders on horseback use a long-handled mallet to drive a ball into the opposing team's goal, and it is often described as one of the oldest team sports in the world. It originated in Persia and Central Asia more than two thousand years ago, spread across Asia, and took its modern organized form in 19th-century India and Britain before spreading worldwide.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Origin	Believed to have arisen among the nomadic tribesmen of Central Asia; played in King Darius I's Persian Empire from 522 BCE¹
First recorded game	600 BC, between the Turkomans and Persians; the Turkomans won²
Name	An Anglicization of the Balti/Tibetan word for "ball" (pulu or pholo)¹^•³
First formal rules	Drawn up by the Hurlingham Polo Committee in London in 1875; redesignated the Hurlingham Polo Association in 1925¹
Olympic history	Contested at the 1900, 1908, 1920, 1924, and 1936 Games; Great Britain leads the medal table with eight medals and three golds⁴
World governing body	Federation of International Polo (FIP), founded 25 November 1982 in Buenos Aires with 11 founding members; IOC-recognized, with 86 national association members as of January 2026⁴
Match length	Low-goal teams play 4 chukkers (periods), teams of 20 goals or more play 6, and only Argentina's triple crown plays 7⁵

Ancient origins

The game's earliest roots are hard to pin down. Polo's origins cannot be traced to a single inventor, and although it has been played for more than 2,500 years, the game is thought to have emerged from the nomadic horsemen of Central Asia, who sharpened their riding and combat abilities through a pastime resembling today's sport.¹ What is known is that polo was played in King Darius I's Persian Empire by large teams of horsemen with few or no formal rules, and from Persia the sport migrated to Arabia and Tibet, and then to India, China, and Japan.¹

One account gives the first recorded game as taking place in 600 BC between the Turkomans and the Persians, with the Turkomans winning.² In the fourth century AD, King Sapoor II of Persia learned to play at the age of seven, and in the 16th century Shah Abbas the Great built a polo ground at Ispahan, then the Persian capital, 300 yards long with goalposts eight yards apart.² The Moguls were largely responsible for carrying the game eastward, and by the 16th century the Emperor Babur had established it in India; the game had long been played in China and Japan but had died out in those countries by the time the West came into contact with them.² The name itself is an Anglicization of the Tibetan Balti word for ball.¹

The British revival in India

Polo's modern form began in Manipur. In the 1850s, British tea planters discovered the game in Manipur, an Indian princely state on the Burmese border, and founded the world's first polo club at Silchar in nearby Assam.¹ The Calcutta Polo Club, the world's oldest active club, followed in 1863, and the Malta Polo Club was created in 1868 by British officers stopping off on their way home from India.¹

In 1869, Captain Edward "Chicken" Hartopp of the 10th Hussars read about the game in The Field magazine and, with his brother officers, organized the first match in England, against a team from the 9th Lancers. That game took place on Hounslow Heath on June 1, 1870, with eight recorded players on each side, and the Royal Horse Guards were quick to take up the new sport of "hockey on horseback."¹

Codification and global spread

The first game at Hurlingham's grounds was played in 1874, and in 1875 the Hurlingham Polo Committee in London drew up the first formal set of rules to protect the interests of the sport, the players, and the horses. In 1925 the committee was redesignated as the Hurlingham Polo Association, which remains the governing body for polo in the United Kingdom, Ireland, the United Arab Emirates, and many other countries.¹

The sport spread quickly in the 1870s. British settlers organized the first match in Argentina in 1870; in 1876 Lieutenant Colonel Thomas St. Quintin took the game to Australia, and James Gordon Bennett Jr., a publisher who had first seen a match at Hurlingham, introduced polo to the USA.¹ In the United States the game caught on immediately, and by 1890 there were seven clubs, which formed the Polo Association, today's United States Polo Association, to standardize the rules.⁶ Hurlingham rules were adopted as the standard of play elsewhere as well, including in Canada, where the game was first played in 1878 by British garrison officers in Halifax and where the Calgary Polo Club, founded in 1890, is the oldest club to operate continuously since its inception.⁷

The Olympic era and the FIP

Polo was contested at the Olympic Games in 1900, 1908, 1920, 1924, and 1936, but never attracted a large field of competing nations. The sport was dominated at the Olympics by Great Britain, with eight medals and three golds, and the last Olympic polo competition took place in 1936, just before World War II.⁴^•⁷

The Federation of International Polo (FIP) was formed on 25 November 1982 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, with 11 founding members: Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, El Salvador, France, Italy, Mexico, Peru, Spain, and Zimbabwe. FIP is recognized by the International Olympic Committee, and one of its main goals is to restore polo's Olympic status, though the sport's exclusivity makes that unlikely. As of January 2026, FIP has 86 national associations as members.⁴ FIP runs the World Polo Championship for national teams, the Women's World Polo Championship, the European Championship, and an Arena World Polo Championship played on sand, and its Polo Development Fund, founded in 2013, supports clinics, equipment, and grassroots programs in developing polo countries.⁸

Argentina and the modern game

Argentina became the sport's leading nation. The Argentine Polo Association was created in 1922 from the merger of the National Polo Federation and the River Plate Polo Association, and the country's triple crown of tournaments, the Campeonato Abierto de Tortugas Country Club, the Hurlingham Open, and the Palermo Open, is the only circuit in which matches are played over seven chukkers.⁵ Argentine players follow an international circuit, playing in Palm Beach from January to April, England for three months, Sotogrande in Spain in August, and Argentina from September to December.⁵

Polo is a mixed sport in which patrons of modest handicap hire professional players to make a competitive team, and low-goal polo is described by the Hurlingham Polo Association's chief executive as competitive, fun, and central to the sport's community life in Britain.⁹ Compared with other equestrian disciplines, polo is the only team equestrian sport, and its costs at amateur level are broadly comparable to those of other horse sports.¹⁰

The polo shirt

The garment that shares the sport's name has its own history. Polo shirts trace their origins to a polo club in Argentina in the late 19th century, where players found the traditional gear for the game too hot to wear. In 1920 the Argentine polo star Lewis Lacey opened a sports shop in Buenos Aires selling a shirt embossed with a logo of a player astride a pony, and within a few years custom-made polo shirts had become leisure wear for the wealthy on the French Riviera. In 1933 the French tennis star René Lacoste, known as "le Crocodile," began producing a polo shirt with a crocodile logo, marketed in the U.S. from 1951 under the name of the English tailor Jack Izod. Ralph Lauren introduced his own version with a polo-player motif in 1972, having chosen the name for the lifestyle it suggested even though he had never seen the sport played.¹¹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Sports, games, and recreation › Other team and ball sports › Hockey and remaining team sports › Polo, roller hockey, and minor stick-and-ball variants

Initially written Sep 17, 2026 · Reviewed: Sep 30, 2026; Oct 21, 2026 · Edited: Sep 30, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026 · Last review: Oct 21, 2026

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