Nacho and Giant Steps draw polo crowd

Polo isn’t new to Sonoma Valley – it’s been played at the Wild Oak Saddle Club in Oakmont since about 1975 – but it may never have reached the heights of elegant attention in the Valley that it received Sept. 20, when the St. Regis Cup arrived at Wild Oak, in company with international star Ignacio Figueras, best known as Nacho.

The St. Regis Cup is a promotional gambit by the exclusive international hotel chain, which stages matches around the world, generally in proximity to one of its esteemed facilities, and usually in support of a charitable cause. Last Saturday, St. Regis pulled out all the stops, hosting a $300-per-head, catered and coddled experience for a lot of beautiful people, including Nacho and his model-wife Delfina Blaquier.

Beneficiary of the event, and recipient of some $40,000, was Giant Steps, the Petaluma-based therapeutic riding center that uses horses for healing people with physical, emotional, cognitive and developmental challenges.

Nacho, who leads the St. Regis team on the polo field and serves as the company’s first-ever “connoisseur,” is also the face of Ralph Lauren, appearing in ads for everything from clothes, to cologne and umbrellas.

At Wild Oak, he led the St. Regis team to a victory over the surprisingly tenacious team from Hamel Family Winery in Glen Ellen, assembled by winery founder George Hamel, Jr., who was also a sponsor of the event.

Riding for Hamel’s four-person team was 26-year-old Collin White, a Napa Valley native now living in San Francisco, who plays polo most weekends, and has since the age of nine.

White says he loves the excitement and camaraderie, but admits that polo is one of the most dangerous sports in the world. “It’s a shoulder-to-shoulder physical contact sport,” he said, played on a 1,000-pound animal. The pace of the game, White said, is very fast, “and changes of direction take place pretty quickly. So it’s not unusual when a horse goes down.”

White said he has broken his wrist a couple of times, had a concussion and gotten a lot of bruises. Once, he ran into the goal post, the horse went down and stepped on his hand.

For those unfamiliar with the sport, a match is played with four riders per team, on a field that is 300 yards long and 160 yards wide, with padded goal posts at either end. Riders wield long wooden mallets to strike a hard, plastic ball. A match has either four or six periods, called chukkers, lasting 7.5 minutes each, with a three-minute break between the first and second, and third and fourth chukker. There’s also a 15-minute halftime break. The multiple breaks are necessary for riders to change horses, because, given the pace of the match (horses reach speeds of 35 miles per hour) and the size of the field, the horses wear out quickly and are seldom ridden for more than one chukker.

Polo players are handicapped, more or less like golfers, but in their case the rating reflects the number of goals they’re worth in a game. Ratings go from minus-2 to 10.

Given the equine investment, polo is no poor man’s sport. White, who is rated as a 2-goal player, said he has three horses and has to borrow the rest. A commercial real estate broker by day, he said he has considered a career on the professional circuit, but concluded, “It’s a tough road, all the horses, all the vet bills, it’s a lot to pay for.”

Unless you’re Nacho, who is reputedly worth $30 million and is paid tens of thousands a match.

But watching him mingle with Saturday’s crowd, it was clear Nacho isn’t into polo just for the money. At one point, he took a 7-year-old Giant Steps client named Grace Anne for a ride on his polo pony. At another point, he rode his horse up among the spectators and held out his mallet for a child to shake, clearly enjoying fun with his fans.

St. Regis has announced its intentions to make the Sonoma Valley match an annual event. If that happens, we can expect to have more Nacho in our future.