Given that horse polo is one of the world’s oldest sports, having been played for thousands of years before reaching Great Britain in the mid-19th century, it only received a world championship in the 1980s.
Despite this, as well as the fact that it was an Olympic event from 1900 until 1936, polo did not for the longest time have a sanctioned world championship.
Many of the biggest polo-playing nations did have matches against each other, and the United States, United Kingdom and Argentina all have major polo tournaments, but what was missing was a unified international championship akin to the Football World Cup.
However, after the Second World War, the appetite for polo had diminished significantly outside of Argentina, and the sport managed to lose its Olympic status as a result.
Eager to get that back, President of the Argentine Polo Association Marcos Uranga argued that there should be an international polo federation to standardise rules, encourage more regular international play and lay the groundwork for a world championship.
This led to the Federation of International Polo and the World Polo Championship, with the first scheduled to take place in Buenos Aires, Argentina in April 1987, with a 10-14 goal handicap limit for the entire team to ensure an even playing field.
In this first championship, just five teams took part, with hosts Argentine, Mexico, Brazil, Spain and Australia each playing a game between each other and the winner was the team with the most wins at the end.
It incorporated what was then seen as the revolutionary split-string system, with 28 horses provided to each team by the luck of the draw to avoid having horses play too much of a factor in the results.
Ultimately, despite an exciting final game between Argentina and Mexico where the teams both tied, the hosts won the entire tournament.
Just two years later, the second tournament would see eight nations take part, six of which were first-time entrants and led to some shocks in Berlin as Argentina would miss the finals, leading to an exceptionally close game between England and the United States, with the Americans winning by just one goal.