If polo is one of the world’s oldest sports, emerging as it did around the 6th Century BCE amongst the nomads of Central Asia, then yak polo, also known as sarlagan polo, is one of the world’s most recent. It originated in the mid-2000s both as a way to drive tourism to the grasslands of Mongolia, and to highlight the plight of the wild yak, whose number has been gradually declining due to an increase in extreme weather incidents, known on the steppe as zuds. Over the past twenty years the sport has increased in popularity, and is today administered by the Mongolian Association of Sarlagan Polo, who put on four games a week to tourists and locals alike –– although it’s also independently played in the mountainous Hindu Kush region of Pakistan.
Rule-wise, yak polo is largely similar to regular polo, albeit played on a much smaller pitch. Two teams of three compete to guide a ball into the opposing team’s goal using long mallets, and the team with the most goals at the end of the game wins. The length of the match is decided beforehand and differs by region, but two periods of fifteen minutes is the most common time limit in the Mongolian game. It might sound simple, but the riders have to be highly skilled. Yaks, for all their strange, shaggy beauty, are not the most lithe or limber of creatures. Manoeuvring one with any grace or purpose is no mean feat, given they have the turning circle of a small bucket wheel excavator. The Hurlingham Club this is not!
