Katherine Wynn is in charge of the riding his horse. ‘It’s my job to push on when Dan wants me to, and to steady back when I need to ease up. I have to make sure the starts are quick and easy and that we’re going the right way. It helps to know your team, so you can communicate more easily as you are hurtling along.’
The start is the biggest challenge. Even for a beginner at trotting or walking pace, the moment the force of the horse grabs you, snatches you by surprise. You will lose your balance and wobble, and maybe fall off. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have any experience with horses, but it does help to come from a background of snowboarding, skateboarding or mountain boarding. It’s a sturdy board on four wheels with two straps to fit your feet into. You begin by being towed by someone on foot before then hooking up just a few feet away from the bottom of your horse. The most important thing to remember is to let go of the rope if you feel yourself losing your balance.
This is why I was able to roll to a sudden stop, rather than being dragged head first through the grass. By my third go around, I had worked out that if you think of it as water skiing and get into a rhythm at the side of the horse, the balance and speed feels more under control. I was whooping with pride as we got up to a canter.
It may have felt like we were going at 50 miles per hour, but it was probably 20. However, I was getting a little bit of air over some of the muddy bumps and started to feel like I was riding the wake from a boat. I was grateful to Katherine for noticing me coming alongside the horse at one point and for pushing on slightly faster so that I wasn’t pulling the horse, rather than the way it’s meant to be, and we made it around in one piece. I hadn’t got up to a gallop, because new horse boarder Dan Wild had told me ‘I have found a whole new world of pain’. Falling off has been compared to getting out of a car at 30 miles an hour. ‘But I love it,’ he added. ‘I have always been around horses, but wanted an extreme adrenalin sport which tapped into that, and also my love of board sports.’
There can’t be many cooler sights than seeing a boarder hit top speed behind a galloping horse which is kicking up a confetti of mud and grass. That’s why they wear the goggles, but unlike in water skiing if you do come off, you are not going to be soaking wet, and you can be surfing the soil again in seconds.
To give horseboarding a go, or to marvel at the roman riding skills then visit the website: www.britishhorsesurfingassociation.com
POLO
First of all I have to apologise to the people enjoying a picnic, or queuing for an ice cream on a gloriously sunny day at Hurtwood polo club in Surrey, in 2008.
It was a charity polo day to raise money for the Mark Davies Injured Riders Fund, and there were teams made up of professionals, celebrities and novices from the media. I was on a team captained by Kenny Jones, the former drummer with The Who and talented polo player. Other stars who were proving they could swing it with their mallets were Katie Price and Matt Baker.
I had been given some lessons by Kenny’s son, and he had built a few foundations, so that I could even trot and hit the ball at the same time. Word about my ‘ability’ spread and to my horror, on the big day I was paired with the best, most decorated polo pony there: a high goal stallion who knew the game inside out.
However, that was the trouble. He did, and I didn’t. In my defence, it is such a different form of riding. For a start it’s one handed, and I was told to grip the reins as if holding a steering wheel on a go-kart. Push the reins forward, then back, and side to side to steer. It seemed simple enough, but my ‘Champion the wonder horse’ wasn’t going to listen to my cautious instructions. He had pride; he was king of the pitch and was intent on showing it.
My efforts to restrain him with tweaks of the reins and polite croaks of ‘whoa!’ only seemed to confuse the poor athlete, who took a canter towards the ice cream van. With just a white line of rope and tiny sideboards separating the charging Bushell from picnic hampers and children, the crowd started to scatter with panic, saving whatever they could. But just as I was about to be the flake in a 99, my majestic mount averted any carnage by banking around to the right. He took us back to the horse boxes, where he could replace me with a proper polo player. He had given the crowd a glimpse of what he was having to put up with, and we were both relieved when we swapped partners.
I spent the rest of the match on a retired grey who loved the fact that I didn’t have the conviction to get him out of a walk, and we gently turned in the middle as the action stormed past us like a tornado. Play whizzed past one way, and then by the time we’d turned our bewildered heads, the whirlwind came back in the other direction.
What I did see close up was how physical top polo can be. It’s no wonder it has been described as rugby on horseback. There is another sport which fits that description and has similarities with basketball, and that’s Horseball, and a date with the British team is pencilled in for the future. As for polo, don’t be fooled by the chink of champagne glasses and polite country chatter. This is raw, physical and played at a thunderous pace. The sight of thoroughbred juggernauts putting on the emergency brakes and turning on a few blades of grass, while potentially colliding with others doing the same, is spine tingling. They reach 40 miles per hour as the high-speed scrums flow from one end of the pitch to the other.
It’s no surprise that the top polo players have to be like gladiators, because the roots of this sport are in war. Alexander the Great is quoted as saying that he represented the stick, while the ball was the world he intended to conquer.
There’s doubt over when polo actually started, with different sources claiming there was a game played by Persians in the 5th century BC, and in China even earlier. The word polo comes from the Tibetan word ‘pulu’, which means ball. According to the website Indiapolo.com, it seems that at first, polo was a way of training mounted troops for battle, with as many as 100 on each side. It became the national sport of India under the Mughal dynasty until the end of the 16th century, and India has often been seen as the home of the modern game. By 1870 it had spread throughout British India, where serving army officers and high ranking officials had ponies to hand. As word got around, one officer who’d read about the game in a magazine tried to set up a game with walking sticks and billiard balls. Needless to say he didn’t get very far. Thankfully if you go to a match today, the balls and sticks are much more sophisticated and the players have the skills to match.
Even after a few lessons, my full polo debut had ended in personal humiliation. I like to think I played a crucial midfield holding role on my grey though, because our team, led by the talented Kenny Jones, won the tournament. It seems the drummer is a wizard whatever shape of stick he’s holding. I could and should have ended my polo career with my head held high, but then a version of the sport came along that really does enable relative beginners like me to get involved without any danger of putting ice cream vans out of business.
ARENA POLO
If you thought polo was out of reach, well ‘Arena’ is doing what five-a-side has done for football and making it much more accessible. It’s on a much smaller pitch, 300 by 150 feet, and there are high walls all around, so your horse can’t gallop off out of control. The balls are bigger and softer and if you do fall, you are guaranteed a soft landing because instead of grass, it’s played on rubbery mulch.
‘You can see the ground is nice and soft,’ Phillip Meadows of the Royal Berkshire Polo Club assured me, ‘and you feel safer and more comfortable in that protected environment. It’s when you take people outside onto the full hard grass pitches that they tense up.’
He was right. I joined a game with another novice polo player – Nathaniel Parker, the actor, who I had met on the set of Merlin. He is very experienced on horses and does most of the riding himself when filming. He’s also a huge racing fan, but this was the first time he had been on a polo pony.
‘This is so different. It’s forward,