Nearly every sport has had at least one period that has felt like its most defining apex, typically defined as a golden age, and many enthusiasts, players and historians alike will debate when exactly these golden ages began and ended.
For example, it has been argued that English men’s football’s golden age spans from England reaching the semi-final at the 1990 World Cup and lasted until Manchester United won the Treble in 1999, although arguably there have been other periods of success and exciting football since.
In men’s tennis, the golden age could either be during the Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe rivalry (1978 – 1981) or the Rafa Nadal and Roger Federer during the peak of their rivalry (2004 to arguably 2010), whilst the golden age of women’s tennis is defined by the peak of Serena Williams.
The golden age of horse polo, on the other hand, is a source for constant debate but is arguably considered to be the period from 1918 to 1939, between the two world wars and linked with a more general golden age for American sports.
During this time, 20,000 people would regularly travel to Meadow Brook Polo Club to attend the two most prestigious events on the polo calendar in the early 20th Century: the U.S. Open Polo Championship and the Westchester Cup.
This could arguably be credited to the work of Harry Payne Whitney, a ten-goal polo player in his own right but whose defining legacy to the sport took the form of developing a completely new high-speed approach to the game with players and horses trained to match that tempo.
The result of this was utter domination in the 1909 International Polo Cup, where the fast break gallops and long passes not only created a dominant style of play but also a highly entertaining one.
The peak of the golden age of polo lasted until the early 1930s, when the Great Depression started to take its toll on many of the sports that had thrived in the 1920s, with both baseball and polo being heavily affected.
The aftermath of the Second World War meant that whilst polo has survived and thrived in the years since, it has taken a very different form from that golden era.