[GreatBriton]

Rubbish in almost every sport that it competes in, Scotland has finally found one sport that it is good at - elephant polo. But even then, only one member of the team is Scottish. Most of the others are English, and one is Indian.

The Times November 26, 2005

Elephantine achievement sets Scotland worlds apart

By David Lister

The rugby side might struggle against the New Zealand All Blacks today, but the nation leads the field elsewhere



IN FOOTBALL they are ranked an abject 61 in the world, in rugby union they struggled to beat Samoa last weekend and in snooker, the once all-conquering Stephen Hendry has had such an unhappy year that he has threatened to quit. At least there is one sport in which Scotland can justifiably claim to be world-class: elephant polo.

Forget Andy Murray’s tennis heroics or Rhona Martin and her team of gold medal- winning Olympic curlers. When Torquhil Campbell — a distant cousin of the Queen better known as the 13th Duke of Argyll — dons his pith helmet and climbs on top of a three-metre high pachyderm in Nepal on Monday he will do so as, technically, Scotland’s leading sports figure.

It may not be the world’s fastest sport, but as the earth trembles beneath the feet of his lumbering four-tonne beast, the 37-year-old Duke, captain of the Chivas Regal Scotland team, will be hoping that his side is able to win for a second consecutive year the Elephant Polo World Championship.

Assuming they manage to avoid drinking too much champagne in the bar at the world-famous Tiger Tops Jungle Lodge in Nepal’s Royal Chitwan National Park, only three things stand in the path of Scotland and further world glory.

First is the possibility that one of the team’s elephants gets confused by the switch of ends at half-time and scores a spate of own goals; second, that the elephant in goal takes a nap in the middle of the pitch; finally, and most daunting of all, is the prospect that one of the beasts decides to take a comfort break while sitting on the ball.

Speaking as he prepared to fly to Nepal to defend the title, the Duke shrugged off the challenges facing his team. Although they practise just three times a year — and many thousands of miles from Scotland, where elephants have yet to be seen on the Duke’s 55,000-acre estate — the team of amateurs has become so successful that they will start on a handicap of minus five goals when the week-long tournament opens.

“I hold the trophies aloft with great pride,” he said. “I think Andy Murray might be giving us a run for our money at the moment but it’s just nice to feel that Scotland can be doing well at sport.” His team’s victory in last year’s event, in front of 4,000 spectators, was hailed by the Scottish Parliament as “an inspiration to all Scotland’s sportsmen and sportswomen”. Two months ago the side followed up their triumph by winning at the King’s Cup tournament in Thailand.

As they prepared to do battle last night, the Scottish Executive said that it wished the team “the very best of luck”. Strictly speaking, the Duke is the only Scottish member of the team, but then, like the Republic of Ireland’s football team, who is counting?

The Duke, a regional manager in Asia for Chivas Brothers, the whisky company that counts Chivas Regal as its main brand, is as striker, on the smallest, nimblest elephant, which is capable of speeds up to 25mph. Peter Prentice, an expatriate Englishman and regional director for Chivas Brothers in Asia Pacific, plays in midfield.

In defence is Geoffrey Dobbs, also English, a hotelier in Sri Lanka and a founder member of the Sri Lankan Elephant Polo Association; in goal, on the slowest elephant, is Colonel Raj Kalaan, a retired officer in the Indian Army.

Just seven other teams will be playing this year, after two from the United States dropped out at the last minute. In a clear indication of its growing appeal among wealthy westerners, only one team, National Parks of Nepal, is from a country where elephants are indigenous. There are teams from Hong Kong, Iceland, Ireland and three others from Britain, including one from the Gurkhas and another of young executives from the City of London.

The competition, which raises tens of thousands of pounds for charity, is above all a social event for ambassadors, dukes, wealthy Nepalese and British Gurkha officers, where the expense of staying in one of the world’s most exclusive gamepark resorts acts as a barrier to many would-be players. Each team pays an entry fee of $12,000 (about £6,970).

In the words of one observer, it is an “opportunity to hobnob with friends you haven’t seen since the quail-hunting season”. Alex Davies, 29, a London stockbroker, whose Trunk & Disorderly team from the City consists of financiers and financial PRs, pledged to give Chivas Regal Scotland a run for their money but said that the main aim was to “win in the bar”.

He said that the game had a lumbering charm all of its own, even in its very worst moments. “They are all sorts of natural hazards when the elephants go to the toilet on the pitch,” he said. “You don’t want to have to whack your ball out of that, and if you do, just close your eyes and duck.”

TRUNKS STRICTLY PROHIBITED

Arguably the world’s most surreal sporting event, the Elephant Polo World Championship is now in its 24th year. Although an early version of the sport was played by the ladies of the Indian Raj, the modern form of the game was born over a glass of whisky in the bar of the St Moritz Tobogganing Club in Switzerland in 1982.

Jim Edwards, founder of the Tiger Tops resorts in Nepal, was approached by James Manclark, the Scottish landowner and bobsleighing champion. “Your elephants have got to learn to play polo,” the Scot told him. Weeks later a telegram reached Edwards in Nepal with the message: “Arriving Kathmandu April 1. Have long sticks. Get elephants ready.”

Although the game has undergone several changes since then — it is now played with a standard polo ball rather than a football, which the elephants loved to pop — it is still basically the same. Four elephants per team, all provided by the Royal Chitwan National Park, chase a bamboo ball around a pitch some 120 metres long by 70 metres wide. Two riders sit atop each beast: the first a Nepalese “mahout”, or elephant handler, who steers by prodding it behind the ears, and the second the player, who is tied on with ropes and wields a specially built mallet up to 2.5 metres long.

The games consists of two 10-minute “chukkas”, or halves, with a 15-minute interval. At half-time the teams swap elephants, thereby eliminating any possible advantage. No loitering in front of goal is allowed. The use of trunks is also strictly prohibited, although elephants are permitted to kick the ball.

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