Horseball History: the Origins in Pato and the French Codification

Every horseball history begins in the same place: Argentina, and a game called pato. Horseball is a direct heir to it. The earliest trials were played with a pato ball, through pato goals, under pato priority rules, using the pato technique for lifting the ball off the ground, in those years without even a strap joining the stirrups together, which tells you something about the riders.

What makes the origins of horseball unusual is that the sport was not invented so much as shrunk. Argentine pato was played over roughly 300 metres. Nothing about that fits inside a covered European riding school, and the entire early history of horseball is the record of people cutting the game down until it did.

Pato reached France through Captain Clave, a champion show-jumper of the 1930s. In 1936 he changed several of its rules, the size of the ball among them, and considered the result different enough to deserve a new name: horse-ball. It drew real interest. Matches were played at horse shows between cavalry regiments.

Then the war came and the game effectively died. For years it survived only inside a few riding clubs, kept alive not as a sport but as a drill: an exercise for deepening a rider's seat. Pato itself returned to public view afterwards in its Argentine form, presented regularly by the stuntman Mario Lurashi. This is why the horseball history told by the sport's own documents starts in 1936 and then jumps three decades.

In 1970 the French equestrian federation decided to develop equestrian games, with an aim that had nothing to do with competition: riding instruction was overwhelmingly delivered by ex-military staff and left little room for enjoyment. Period cartoons of the instructor bellowing across the school were not much of an exaggeration.

Two men in two regions moved first, Pascal Marry in Provence and Jean-Claude Gast in Centre-Val-de-Loire, both working riding instructors who later became regional technical advisers. Gast, drawing on the pato played in Lorraine, adapted a German pato ruleset that allowed a cross to be used for the pick-up. Both men went a long way afterwards: Gast to National Technical Director of the French federation, Marry to technical adviser at the ministry for Youth and Sports. It is a fair measure of how seriously the project was backed.

The first indoor pato match was played at the 1977 Salon du Cheval, Centre-Val-de-Loire against Provence, under a Commission for Youth and Games chaired by Philippe Lefebvre-Pontalis and later by M. Gaboriau. In November 1978 a seminar for regional technical advisers at the National Equestrian School in Saumur brought in two more people who mattered: Jean-Paul Depons, who went on to establish the base of the sport with the federation, and Philippe Thiebaut.

In February 1979 the first French Championship of Equestrian Games was held at Poitiers. The programme was a mixed bag: two skill games, two relays, and two team games: paddock-polo and the sport then still called indoor pato. Its first rules were a compromise between pato (a handled ball, goals 2.70 m up) and Clave's horse-ball, which had allowed players to dismount to collect the ball. There was no pick-up strap yet, and only the Provence and Aquitaine teams could lift the ball while still mounted.

The first final deserves recording: Aquitaine, a side made largely of former rugby players, against a Northern team of four women. Aquitaine won, and then handed their opponents flowers at the prize-giving. Philippe Thiebaut and Jean-Paul Depons refereed, under Paul Lanchais, then National Technical Assistant Director.

By the second championship that October the lesson had landed. The rules needed to move further from pato, to suit small arenas and ordinary riding-school horses, and to look like a team sport rather than a display. Horseball was codified and its first rulebook published the same year. Thiebaut went off to found teams in Avignon and Salon-de-Provence; Depons put his time into coaching.

Here the horseball history stops being French and starts being international. From 1988 France began demonstrating the game abroad and other countries started building teams. The first European Cup followed in 1992, with England, Belgium, Germany, France, Italy and Portugal. An international federation was established in 1999 to run development, and the expansion after that is quick to list: demonstration matches at the 2002 World Equestrian Games in Jerez, a first women's European Cup in 2003, a first junior European Cup and FEI recognition as an official equestrian discipline in 2004.

The sport then went beyond Europe. A World Cardon Pato-Horse-Ball Championship in Buenos Aires in 2006 drew ten nations. A club Champions League started in Stockholm in 2007. The first World Cup was played at Ponte de Lima in 2008, and Argentina, Brazil and Canada entered the international field, the origins of horseball closing a loop back to the country that supplied the original game.