Sports GK Quiz: Polo and Equestrian Sports

A polo team puts four mounted players on the field, numbered one to four, where number one is the attacking forward and number four, called the back, is the main defender.

A polo match is divided into chukkas, also spelt chukker, of seven minutes each, and a match has four to six of them depending on the tournament; ponies are usually changed between chukkas because the galloping is so hard on the horse.

Sagol Kangjei, played in Manipur on the small Manipuri pony, is the game from which the modern rules of polo were drawn after British officers and tea planters saw it in the eighteen fifties, which is why Manipur is called the birthplace of modern polo.

The Ezra Cup is the oldest polo tournament in India and is played under the Indian Polo Association, along with other well known trophies such as the Sir Pratap Singh Cup and the Maharaja Jiwajirao Scindia Gold Cup.

Polo featured in five editions of the Olympic Games between 1900 and 1936 and was dropped after the Berlin Games of 1936, mainly because of the cost and difficulty of transporting strings of horses; Argentina won that last Olympic title.

Argentina has produced most of the ten-goal handicap players in the history of the game and its Argentine Open, played at the Palermo ground in Buenos Aires, is considered the most important polo tournament in the world; Argentina also won the last Olympic polo title.

The correct answer is A, FEI, the Federation Equestre Internationale, founded in 1921 with its headquarters at Lausanne in Switzerland; it governs dressage, jumping, eventing, driving, endurance, vaulting and para-equestrian sport.

The Olympic programme has exactly these three equestrian disciplines, each with an individual and a team event; dressage tests set movements in a marked arena, jumping tests clearing a course of fences, and eventing combines dressage, cross-country and jumping with the same horse.

Equestrian events are not divided by the sex of the rider, so male and female riders contest the same medals in dressage, jumping and eventing, and it is also the only Olympic sport in which an animal competes alongside the athlete.

The correct answer is B, Eventing, also called the three-day event, in which the same horse and rider go through a dressage test, a cross-country course over natural obstacles and a show jumping round; penalty points from all three phases are added and the lowest total wins, so it is…

At the Asian Games held in Indonesia in 2018, Fouaad Mirza won the individual silver and was part of the team that won silver in eventing, the first Indian equestrian medals at the Asian Games in a long gap, and he later represented India at the Olympic Games.

The Marwari horse of the Marwar region of Rajasthan is identified at once by its inward-curving ears, whose tips can touch, and it was the warhorse of the Rathore rulers; it is used today in ceremonial riding and in the native dance called the horse dance.