TRAINNG TALKS AT
“LA RURAL 2016”
Speakers: Ernesto Trotz and Pite Merlos
Ernesto Trotz
“We shall begin by referring to the importance of
training the polo-playing pony. To begin with, we
shall speak about how a horse that is playing the
Palermo Open must be kept. As we are aware that
it is a very small percentage, we shall go over the
concepts of horse-keeping in Open level ponies,
which can then be applied on horses of other
levels of polo.”
Pite Merlos
“The first concept to bear in mind is the search for
excellence or the way to reach the best final pro-
duct, independently of the level of polo it may play.
There are three very important things in my opinion:
first to take each horse as a separate individual;
then interaction between player and horse, and
respect for the time it takes each horse to learn.
It all begins with imprinting; the breaking-in and tra-
ining of the horse, until we reach the stage in which
the horse is trained to become a polo-playing pony.
These are the clear benchmarks that we must un-
derstand; that each horse needs different styles,
from break-in up to training, and in some cases
even different players.
Before we begin with the training, we must talk
about pre-training. Firstly, it must not start off fat
and out of form, and it should have a pre-season.”
260
E.T. We believe that when the pre-season begins
the first important concept is to take the horse as
an individual and know what it does throughout the
whole of the polo season, whereby it is important to
know what the horse did before.
We must be aware that at the beginning the horse
arrives after six months of not exercising; fat and as
though it has just arrived from its holidays, so that
I start off by walking it. Later I begin to trot: first 15
minutes, 20, 30 and so on.
I always try to apply common sense, and start off
slowly… with training that increases daily, until I
reach the point of calculating how many hours it
spends on the exercising track, and here we are
talking about 14 hours a week. All this is done
gradually until we get to trot for 20 minutes. I don’t
believe in doing more than that. And once you have
reached one month of pre-season for a horse that
has been resting for six months, is when we begin
to think about riding it in order to start playing its
first practice matches.
I can start off with a chukka in one of the first
practice matches of the season… and this is when
another essential factor comes into play: do I have
an exercising track which is prepared for a horse
that spends so much time training? The quality
of the track where the horse is going to carry out
these first exercises is very important.