The Last Elephant Polo Match
The sport’s surreal journey reveals what happens when colonial fantasy, animal conservation, and morality collide.
In the winter of 1982, Jim Edwards, a man who rode elephants, and James Manclark, a Scottish polo player, met in a bar in St. Moritz, Switzerland. The two men hit it off over dinner and the following morning found themselves outlining a new game, one that combined both their pastimes. The result? Elephant polo, which they promised to play at Edwards’s lodge in a Nepali national park.
Elephant polo — a slow-motion, high-spectacle cousin of horseback polo, where people use long mallets to drive balls into goals while riding — would soon attract kings, heiresses, adventurers, and retired FBI agents to Nepal, India, Thailand, and more. It was absurd. It was thrilling. It was an empire in miniature. And, for a while, it made everyone feel like royalty. But not the elephants.
Over 40 years later, the sport is all but extinct. Its strange rise and sudden fall tells a larger story — one of pageantry, erasure, and reckoning.