I have no idea what ‘horses for courses’ means. Anyway, the annual snow polo competition is on which is always a great spectacle of both the horses and riders, and the spectactors, most of whom are from Megeve and have just wandered along from the centre of the town for a bit of ‘sport’ before warming themselves up in the BMW or Porsche hospitality tents. There are a number of local teams (needless to say they are all from Megeve) who compete over a few days for a place in Sunday’s final. For the first time, there are women’s teams, one of which the team’s colours are a hideous pink.

It was cold. Very, very cold. So we could only manage about 10 minutes of polo before we left. Still, I think (unless there are some well-hidden intricacies of the game) that we managed to work out all the rules fairly well. The referee (or whatever they’re called in polo) bravely lobs an orange plastic ball into the mass of 8 riders and horses (4 per team), who then spend the next ten minutes all galloping after the ball wherever it goes, trying to hit it with an unfeasibly long-handled and unwieldy mallet. It appears that there’s very little chance of actually hitting the ball in the direction you want it to go as the poor horses don’t have a clue what’s going on and almost always over-run the ball. This means that the rider is left ineffectually swinging at the ball and 90% of the time, missing it. It’s no wonder that occasionally one of the riders finds his head making contact with the business end of someone else’s mallet.

The object of the game is to get the ball to go between two fairly well spaced goal posts, one set at each end of the pitch. Which, by the way, is huge, so the idea that any single spectator can see what’s going on over the whole pitch is optimistic to say the least.

As it was dark and the action is all fairly frantic, the photos I took are ‘interesting’ but won’t win any competitions.