Club has expanded from seven members to 81 in five years
It takes a lot of care to play one of the oldest sports, polo. Poolesville’s Capitol Polo Club has 90 horses the need daily care on its 170 acres.
The field they play on, all 30 acres, requires nearly as much care as the turf is cut thick but short. Hoof marks are stomped out. Manure is scooped away briskly.
General manager Marcos Bignoli left his native Argentina in 2008 to take over the Capitol Polo Club and since, the club has increased in popularity, now playing the sport polo five times a week, six months a year. Since Bignoli started at Capitol Polo, the club’s membership has increased from seven members to 81.
The club hosts sanctioned tournaments every weekend and a number of large professional charity tournaments every year.
Polo players are assigned a handicap ranging from -2 for beginners to 10 for the best. As a professional, Bignoli, 55, carried a handicap of 6 — one of 50 active players at the time to do so — until he retired to play recreationally, pursue a career in real estate and run his ranch and polo club in Pilar, Argentina.
“Everybody in polo knows who Marcos Bignoli is,” club co-owner and Bethesda resident T. Hoy Booker.
Bignoli started the club’s polo academy, which currently has 30 students, to help take the edge off the game many view as dangerous or cruel to both horse and horseman.
In reality, Bignoli says, neither is true. Riders at the polo academy start slow and learn to ride with one hand before even touching a mallet or ball. After three months, they can progress to play games and start with a -2 handicap.
Horses, on the other hand, train for two years before they can enter a match.
“When you are training a horse from out West, lets say Wyoming, Montana, and it’s be raised with cattle and it’s been roped off, it’s easier — a horse that’s been exposed to pressure and things being swung around their heads,” Bignoli said. “When you train a thoroughbred off the track, you need a lot of patience. You have to show the horse we need it to run, but it’s a whole process of doing it slowly so a horse doesn’t get scared or spooked really forever.
“Time, time and time. Just take that horse very slowly to show them it’s not something that’s going to harm them.”
A match begins or resumes after a goal with a referee throwing the rock-hard ball between two teams of four players each.
From there, more experienced horseman maneuver their steeds to pass the ball forward to where an attacker can break away from the pack and at 40 miles per hour with defensemen in hot pursuit. To prevent a goal, players can hook an opponent’s mallet from the right side or bump an attack off their line on the left side. Never can a defenseman cross in front of the ball or an attackman for safety reasons.
“It’s kind of an adrenaline rush,” attackman Pat Post, 53, of Potomac said. “It’s full blast. These horses are going 30, 40 miles per hour. It can be a bit scary.”
Booker says most beginners find they love the rush of the game and the social aspect of the club even more. Since polo is such a time-consuming sport and economic investment, club dues cost $4,000. The fee does not including the cost of purchasing a horse or renting two or three per match.
“People come out here on a whim and they end up staying,” he said. “You get ‘em to buy one horse and it’s all over.”
Jacob Bogage 