Rain clouds pass over a grey sky at the lush green grounds of the VR Sports Club. Subwoofers thump out new and old hits, glasses tinkle as bottles of drinks emerge. “The game’s beginning,” shout some of the spectators. The well-dressed and well-heeled crowd looks towards the far left corner of the field, applauding and cheering as the hulking, swaying mass of pachyderms comes into the field. The crowd is getting ready for some trunk-to-trunk action at the annual King’s Cup Elephant Polo Tournament. Now in its 13th year, it has become one of the biggest charitable events in the region and a star on the tourism calendar.
The 2014 King’s Cup had 50 elephants and a total of 16 teams with players from all over the world. The lead sponsors were Audemars Piguet, the Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) and Anantara Hotels, Resorts & Spas. Anantara’s own elephant charity, the Golden Triangle Asian Elephant Foundation (GTAEF), ensures the elephants’ safety and organises the crucial annual event. The elephants are chosen carefully for the tournament — only those which have been domestically bred, and not captured from the wild or smuggled in from neighbouring countries are selected.
What makes the event extraordinary is that the elephants are all “working elephants” from the streets of Bangkok. The King’s Cup event is a much-needed break for them — they get food, vitamins and medical care that they necessarily would not otherwise. And by the end of the tournament, they would have helped raise millions of dollars in donations for the care of Thailand’s elephants — both those in captivity and in the wild.
Elephant polo is said to have been founded in 1992 by former Scottish Olympian James Manclark and the late Jim Edwards, who was the proprietor of the The Tiger Tops Jungle Lodge in Nepal. Today the sport has caught on and has its own regulatory body — the World Elephant Polo Association (Wepa) — and features international tournaments in Nepal and Thailand. It is similar to the sport of horse polo, just on a grander scale, complete with grand slams across the world with players, celebrities, the rich and sundry hangers-on. Apart from the many local visitors from Bangkok and around Thailand, spectators, players and media came from all corners of the globe, including the United States, Canada, New Zealand, India, Europe, the UAE, Hong Kong, China and Singapore. King’s Cup guests and players in the past have included European royals Prince Carl-Eugen Oettingen-Wallerstein and his wife, Princess Anna.
At the VR Club in Bangkok, television stars, supermodels, expatriates and international polo players mingle over drinks. Guests take in the action from a marquee area, which is a sea of elaborate head attire, cocktail dresses, embroidered waistcoats, and high heels that sink into the mud and straw. Inside the Anantara tent, guests enjoy limitless supplies of juices and a smorgasbord of wagyu beef burgers, canapes, wraps, salads and even a massage on the house.
One of the five days of the 2014 tournament was the Chang Noi Day (Little Elephant Day), for which 2,000 children from schools all over Bangkok came together for a range of educational games and activities, all teaching the benefits of elephant conservation; on the “Ladies Day” or the “Ascot” of Bangkok women dressed to impress, with the best dressed winning a week’s holiday in the Maldives; and a “High Tea-Off” competition had the competing hotels making delectable desserts. On-pitch entertainment included Thai bands and a specially choreographed performance by Tiffany’s Show Pattaya, Thailand’s most famous transgender cabaret.
The participating 16 teams — many of which were named after their corporate sponsors — included Audemars Piguet, Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Mercedes Benz, Anantara Hotels & Resorts, Casillero del Diablo, Johnny Walker Blue Label and Louis Roederer.
For the uninitiated, here is a crash course in elephant polo: Two teams have three elephants each. Each elephant carries a mahout and a player in polo attire wielding a two-metre wooden stick. The game is played over two seven-minute halves or “chukkas”. The field is divided into two halves, with a circle in the middle and a half circle around each goal. The mahout, or elephant handler, helps the players guide the animals and no more than two elephants from a team can be in one half of the pitch at a time. Even the elephants have to follow rules, whether they are aware of it or not — it is a penalty for an elephant picking up the polo ball with his trunk, and it is another penalty for an elephant lying down in front of the goal. The mahouts and players have to ride astride the elephant’s neck, as the mahout’s feet have to be in contact with the area behind the elephant’s ears to deliver commands. The players and mahouts can find it difficult to communicate as mahouts don’t speak English and most players can’t speak Thai.
With so many degrees of separation between the player and the ball, actually managing to hit the ball can be quite tricky. “First, you don’t have control of the elephant because there’s a mahout who is guiding it,” says Kristin Grube, a professional horse polo player from Dubai and a member of the Anantara Arabian Nights team. “I am near hitting distance of the ball and shouting ‘go! go! go!’ but the elephant’s not moving! Also, it’s difficult to keep your balance — their bodies are so very wide,” she laughs.
The teams include several professional polo players for whom elephant polo needs significant adjustment. Horses and elephants are as different as chalk and cheese. For chunks of time, nothing seems to happen on the field as teams just wait around a ball that is difficult to spot through the massive legs and trucks of the clustered elephants. Suddenly the ball gets knocked clear by someone and several elephants (kind of) rush towards it.
“Our team members come with good mallet skills developed as regular horseback polo players,” says Citibank team member Prab Thakral. “But trading our trusty ponies for elephants is a completely different game.”
On the field, it is evident that two of the elephants from opposing teams have become pals and really like each other. They keep coming around and clustering together, ignoring the mahout’s instructions to separate and make a play for the goal. Meanwhile, a bunch of children standing near the field, lollypops in mouth, chant “come on elephant, come on elephant”.
The teams take the event quite seriously even though it is only an exhibition match. “Our team has bagged 7th place,” says Anantara Arabian Nights team Amer Braik, lounging at the marquee and watching the action. “We have camel races in Abu Dhabi, maybe we’ll try camel polo,” he muses, and then adds with a wry shrug, “but camels are not easy to train.”
The face-off that got the most eyeballs was an exhibition match between former players from the New Zealand All Blacks rugby team and the famous lady boy contingent from Tiffany’s Show. The elephants proved to be a great leveller and the beefy All Blacks from New Zealand could scrape only a 1-0 victory against the red chiffon-clad dancers.
The folks at Anantara see to it that the welfare of the elephants participating in the polo tournament is paramount, with strict rules in place to ensure that the pachyderms are well cared for at all times. When the rain makes the ground slippery, the game is moved to a covered sandy arena usually used by ponies.
Both players and elephants take periodic breaks. The elephants are given a sugar cane or rice ball (packed with vitamins) and the riders hit the stalls to get drinks and some food. People come up to pet the elephants and have pictures taken with them. Some of the more adventurous elephants reach out with their trunks, lightly wrapping them around nervous spectators looking for treats.
Most of the elephants at the King’s Cup have been playing for years now, and seem to be having a whole lot of fun. “Yes, several have played polo before,” affirms John Roberts, official umpire and director of conservation activities for the Anantara group, who knows them all by name. “Gandah is one of my favourites as is Nam Fon.”
Due to heavy rain which turned the grass field too slippery and dangerous for the elephants, the King Power Duty-Free and Audemars Piguet went head to head in a penalty shoot-out, which clinched a win for King Power. After days of hectic match-playing, it was time for the pachyderms’ hard work to be rewarded. The elephants took part in a fruit buffet, which, of course, is “all you can eat”.
Competition aside, the tournament helps raise awareness about the status of elephants, which under Thai law, are treated as working animals. The elephant is venerated and considered a sacred animal in Thailand’s cultural space. Elephant images can be found in its temples. Untill 1938, they were depicted on Thailand’s flag. But the ground reality is that the elephants’ lives become tough once they are captured from the wild and trained for tasks. They were mostly used for logging in forests. Due to rapidly disappearing forests, logging was made illegal in Thailand in 1989. Until then, more than 4,000 elephants were used for logging. Rendered jobless and with no other options, mahouts and their unemployed charges turned to begging on the streets of Bangkok and Chiang Mai (Bangkok passed and eventually enforced laws against this). Deforestation due to logging has also destroyed their natural habitats — they cannot return to the wild.
“We have, over the years, released one elephant back to the wild through the Royal Reintroduction Foundation but the majority can’t go back for two main reasons,” says Roberts. “One, they still belong to their mahouts who depend on them for a living. This is a cycle we are working against but, at this stage, if we bought the elephant from the mahout we can be sure that they will buy another elephant. So we may release one back into the wild but another will be taken out of the forest to replace it. Second, the Royal Reintroduction Foundation is still in its experimental stage. So they can’t release all the elephants. Even if we let ours go there is not enough wilderness left in Thailand to accommodate the 4,500 or so captive elephants we have. For now it is better to work at finding ways in which elephants and humans can live together sustainably while tackling the temptation mahout communities have to take more elephants from the wild.”
The mahouts have requested adding English language and fiscal-responsibility training to the curriculum at their local school and some of the funds from this year’s polo event will go into that. “I may slip in some conservation education in there,” he smiles.
Elephants are an endangered species in Southeast Asia. In 1986, the Asian elephant was added to the World Conservation Union (IUCN) list of endangered species. Unlike African elephants, who were hunted for ivory, the drastic population decline of Asian elephants has been attributed to the rapid loss of habitat due to Thailand’s expanding economy. In 1950, about 60 per cent of Thailand was covered with forest; today it is less than 15 per cent, and declining.
So far the polo-playing pachyderms have helped raise more than $750,000 (Dh2.75 million) for the conservation of their kind. The funds raised are donated to a number of projects, including supporting research; elephant therapy sessions for autistic children; building the first elephant hospital in Krabi in the southern part of Thailand; donating to the Thai Elephant Conservation Centre (TECC) a gantry to help lame elephants stand, a mobile blood centrifuge and an elephant ambulance; housing for the mahouts and families; and shelters for the elephants.
“We’re still totting up how much was raised this year,” Roberts says. “But we know the auction made $14,000, so that’s a good start. We spend the money on projects that benefit as many other elephants as possible. This year, I’m looking forward to expanding our Target Training Positive Reinforcement and Elephant Osteopathy workshops, inviting vets and trainers from across Southeast Asia to learn techniques in elephant care. Some of the money raised will also go to a Cambodian Cardamom Elephant Corridor project where we are helping the Cambodian government and our local partners protect 18,000 hectares of standing forest in the Cardamom Mountains, working with organisations to help the people living on the outskirts of various elephant territories gain benefits from wild elephants or, at least, be less afflicted by them.”
As director of conservation activities for the Anantara group, he is also looking at projects as diverse as community development in forest-edge-dwelling communities; seagrass monitoring and sustainable fishing in Trang; turtle protection and release in Phuket; and some quite large projects in the Maldives to study the marine life there. “As the Anantara brand expands into Africa the possibilities of collaboration with some of the great work already being done there are particularly exciting,” Roberts says.
The TECC has requested a new mobile clinic for treating Thailand’s elephants in an emergency — “that will be a great step if we can pull it off as their vehicle is getting old and does a lot of miles every year and gets to some very hard-to-reach places”, says Roberts.
Anuradha Sengupta is a journalist based in Mumbai.
