Of all the major sports played in Argentina, polo is the one you're likely to be the least familiar with. First played over two thousand years ago in Ancient Persia, the game became popular in the British Raj, and was adopted in Britain in the 1850s, when London's Hurlingham Club was founded. At first known as "hockey on horseback", it was soon called polo, from the Tibetan word for ball. Exported across the Atlantic to the United States in the 1870s, where the rules were changed, it began to be played on Argentina's estancias soon after and the Buenos Aires Hurlingham Club was established in the 1880s. By the 1920s Argentine teams were holding sway in the polo world; Argentina won the gold medal at the 1936 Berlin Olympics and have seldom been beaten internationally ever since. The country's criollo thoroughbreds - known as petisos - and champion polistas are exported worldwide; no leading polo team is complete without a troubleshooter from Argentina, proving that it's not just Argentine football players who earn lucrative livings as sporting mercenaries abroad. Ten-goal players (the top ranking) like Bautista Heguy, earn millions of dollars this way. In the country itself it's a game mainly for estanceros and wealthy families from Barrio Norte, but is nonetheless far less snobbish or exclusive than in Britain or the USA; there are some 150 teams and 5000 club members nationwide. One or two polistas are national heroes, worshipped as pin-ups and heart-throbs almost on a par with footballers and pop stars. Don't miss a chance to see an open championship match in the spring at the Campo de Polo , in Palermo, especially the final at the beginning of December. Even if the rules go over your head, the game is exciting and aesthetically pleasing to watch, with the galloping of athletic hooves over impeccably trimmed frescue and a virile ballet of horsemen waving sticks over their heads and whacking the ball the length of a huge green lawn.

For more information take a look at www.polo.co.uk . To find out more about matches and schools, should you want to learn to play, contact the Asociación Argentina de Polo at Hipólito Yrigoyen 636 (tel 011/4331-4646).