Press & Feedback

Some of the things people have said about the World Championships, The Pukka Chukkas or members of the team:

Mike Bushell reporting for the BBC on the 2008 World Championships - click here for the video and watch for some Pukka people!

The 2009 World Championships even got themselves into Playboy!

The Pukka Chukkas took to the air in the April 2009 edition of Virgin Blue's in-flight magazine

April 28th 2008
My name is Graham Bell and I am the Chairman of Lloyd’s of London Football Club.
Whilst writing to wish Mark every success in the World Elephant Polo Championships (he is very experienced in riding animals of that weight and appearance), I am also taking this opportunity to inform you of a few little known anecdotes about the “coach” of the English ladies football team in Jordan ………..

Mark and I were best men at each others weddings. At his wedding in Barbados I wore a tuxedo and delivered a short and sincere speech.

At my wedding in Bermuda, where shorts and long white socks are the traditional attire, he wore West Ham United socks and took the piss out of all of the guests in poetic form.

When Mark “worked” in Sydney Australia, he used to commute to West Ham home matches. Soon this fact assumed legendary status and he was featured on the number 1 football TV programme in the UK, Sky Sports Soccer AM.

I asked them for the footage to attach to this but Sky TV said they never wanted to see him again.

In the early nineties, he organised a whip round in the London Insurance Market and raised a quarter of a million pounds towards a school for disabled children.

He once upgraded to a hotel penthouse on a business trip and when his furious boss said “Why did you stay in a hotel penthouse ? “he calmly replied “because Madonna cancelled”.

You won’t ever meet a better, funnier or more unpredictable guy.

Top man !

Unlucky elephant !

From the South China Morning Post, the Gulf Times and many other newspapers in the Middle East and Asia - 6th December 2008

Sam Taylor
Dec 06, 2008
"The social side is important, but on the pitch it's serious," Torquhil Campbell, the 13th Duke of Argyll, says as an elephant rushed past with a mallet-swinging hedge fund manager on its back.

The world may be lurching into recession, but in Meghauli in the jungles of southern Nepal it's business as usual for the eclectic bunch of jet-setters gathered here for their annual elephant polo festival. An idea thought up in a bar nearly 30 years ago in the Swiss resort of St Moritz by Nepalese eco-tourism pioneer A.V. Jim Edwards and polo enthusiast James Manclark, has blossomed into a series of tournaments held in Sri Lanka, Thailand and Nepal.

The blue riband event is the World Cup held every year at a grass airstrip on the edge of Nepal's Chitwan national park, 90km southwest of Kathmandu.

Based on the rules of polo, but played on elephants on a smaller field, the 20-minute matches involve teams of four players on various sized elephants tussling for control of the small white ball.

The game can be fast-paced, with the surprisingly sprightly elephants kicking up clouds of dust as they rush up and down the pitch, which is edged on one side by jungles where tigers and rhinos roam.

"The polo stick is up to 96 inches [2.4 metres] long so it requires a lot of skill and strength to use," says the 40-year-old duke and businessman who is competing in a team sponsored by Scottish whisky makers Chivas.

Mahouts, or elephant riders, direct the beasts with hard blows to the head and shoulders with short sticks, leaving the player to focus on whacking the wooden ball to either end of the 100-metre pitch.

Krisjan Edwards, the 38-year-old son of the sport's founder, rejects any suggestion that the sport is cruel to the animals.

"The equivalent for a human being is having a hamster on your shoulder repeatedly hitting you with a toothpick," says Edwards, who manages the Tiger Mountain chain of luxury jungle and mountain resorts established in the 1960s by his father. "It doesn't hurt them; it's just very annoying."

This year the competition - which raises money for conservation work and charities in Nepal - has eight teams with players ranging from experts to total novices.

The US team, New York Blue, trained in their hometown in empty car parks, clinging to the top of SUVs while swinging mallets fashioned from broom handles and plumbing parts.

"It's hugely different than our practices," says team member Bill Keith. "For one thing, the sticks are much heavier than the homemade ones we practised with," he says.

The seven-member US squad of thirtysomething lawyers, bankers, public relations executives and journalists have learned the sport has risks for which their improvised training left them unprepared.

"Our defender Chip took a whack in the side of the head with a mallet and got a golf ball-sized lump," says Keith.

Hundreds of local villagers have gathered to watch the play, setting up peanut and fried noodle stalls opposite the bar where the players are enjoying drinks in the highly encouraged social aspect of the competition. "It's a lot of fun to see, and it brings tourists and money to the area so locals get to benefit," says Jit Bahadur Mahato, a 45-year-old farmer.

Impoverished and aid-dependent, Nepal's economy is largely unconnected to the financial turmoil that has hit worldwide, but the ripples of the downturn are beginning to be felt at the elephant polo, where corporate sponsors pay tens of thousands of dollars to take part.

"I heard that a sponsor did pull out," says Jason Wheeler, whose 10-member Pukka Chukkas team is raising money for multiple sclerosis charities in Britain and Australia.

"They could not be seen sponsoring elephant polo while they were struggling to stay afloat," says Wheeller, 43, who works in oil and gas risk assessment in London.

New York Blue team member Jeff Bollerman has an optimistic take on the economic downturn.

"There is about to be an oversupply of very frivolous people with lots of time on their hands, so from that perspective, I think the sport has a great future," says the 34-year-old banker.

Chitwan make winning startDeependra Baduwal -- Kantipur
Published : 2008-12-02 11:15 am
Published across Nepal

Narayangadh, Dec 1 - Tournament favorite Chitwan National Park made a wining start in the World Elephant Polo Championship underway at Meghauli defeating British Gurkhas 10-7 on Monday.

Chitwan National Park gave the locals something to cheer about as another local team Tiger Tops had suffered a 6-5 defeat at the hands of England's Pukka Chukkas in the day’s early match.

In the other games of the day, Indian Tigress edged England's Air Tusker 3-2 and Scotland's Chivas Regal beat New York Blue 7-5. The game has four members in each team and is played for thirty minutes.

Two Nepali teams along with three teams from England, one from America and one from Switzerland are participating in the championship, which has attracted considerable number of tourists from various countries.

The rule of the championship has been modified several times since its inception in 1983 in a bid to make it simple and easily understandable.

"So far we have invited only those countries who are in our contact," said the organiser of the championship Jim Edwards.

The championship has turned the whole of Meghauli area into a happening place in the last few days. Lodges in the area have seen a sudden growth in customers and domestic airlines have increased their flights to the area.

The following article was printed in October 2008 in Perth's leading sunday newspaper...