I have been in Polo since 1973, and it is amazing who, what, and where has been since then. I was in Boca then Royal Palm Polo, the only high goal there. I was a groom along with several farm and ranch boys from the West and the rest were from stables in the NorthEast, like George, Harvey, JJ , Rodney, Jimmy, Danny and many others. About 1980 we started to have a lot of English ladies come over and take over like Violet, Jill, Carolyn , Betsy and many others. They were much better at keeping up stables and grooming than us. That lasted another 10 years, taking us into the new century. Around then there was a huge inflow of Mexican and Cuban grooms, and some from Puerto Rico and the Dominion Republic. About 15 years later though we started to see a lot of Argentine grooms, as we gathered many more Argentine pros and very seasoned ones. Today we see probably 60% of grooms Argentine. But the biggest change I see in grooms is that today probably 80% of them do not take care of more than 5 horses, and could not tell what a bowed tendon looks like. And yet horses cost 50 times what they did even as early as in 2000. Until this new era, old grooms had at least 8 horses. We wonder why it cost so much for horses. It’s sort of like race horses–all the bullshit about breeding and Super Horses, computers and analysis, and yet no one has broken Secretariat’s record set in 1973 for the Kentucky Derby. All polo horses played a chukkar and all pros brought no more than 8 horses ((( WHY ))) ? Read Javier Tanoria’s theroy
just my opinion
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