Horseball Equipment: the Ball, the Strap, and What a Host Must Supply

The most important piece of equipment in horseball costs almost nothing and is not the ball.

It is the strap that joins the stirrups underneath the horse. Without it a rider cannot hang off the side at a gallop and get back up, and the whole sport becomes a dismounting exercise. In February 1979, at the first French Championship of Equestrian Games at Poitiers, no such strap existed. Only the Provence and Aquitaine teams could pick the ball up while still mounted; everybody else got down for it, because the rules at that stage still allowed them to.

Add the strap and the game changes shape entirely.

The ball

A light-coloured size-4 junior football, 65 centimetres in circumference, inside a harness carrying six leather handles roughly 31 centimetres long. Six, so that a handle is presented whichever way it lands.

The design is inherited straight from pato, where the handled ball was the whole mechanism, and it is the single most visible piece of Argentine ancestry in the modern sport. Captain Clave’s 1936 adaptation changed the ball’s size and considered that significant enough to justify renaming the game.

There is no stick. Everything is done by hand, which puts horseball closer to basketball than to polo, and the sport’s own documents make that comparison themselves.

Why the ball is a size 4

A size-4 football is the junior ball, smaller than the size 5 an adult football match uses. Captain Clave’s 1936 adaptation of pato changed the ball’s size among other rules, and he considered the changes significant enough to justify a new name for the game.

The reason is grip. A ball has to be liftable and throwable one-handed from horseback by a rider whose other hand is occupied. Six handles on a smaller body is a solution to a specific ergonomic problem, and it is the piece of equipment that most clearly separates horseball from every stick-and-ball mounted sport.

Rider kit

The Sport Rules cover players in rule 5, split into licences, equipment and player protection, and there is a separate provision for broken tack during play. The French search data is blunt about what people actually buy: helmet, ball, and the pick-up strap, in that order.

What the venue has to bring

This is where the equipment list stops being about players. The Organisation Rules are a 14-page host specification, and the kit inventory runs: pitch, paddock, stabling, national flags and an anthem, officials, a notice board, a sound system, a power supply, referee materials, spectator stands, first aid, flood lighting, horses for the referees, a commentator, anti-doping provision and veterinary inspection.

Grass is allowed for the pitch, weather permitting, but only if teams are told at least two months in advance. The default is sand or a similar light material, firm and not slippery and not too deep.

The clause I keep coming back to is the power supply having its own numbered section. Somebody wrote that because a competition once lost its lighting mid-tournament, and now every host has to demonstrate they will not.

The item the rules spend the most words on is not the ball

Rule 5 covers players in three parts: licences, equipment and protection. Rule 6 covers horses and tack. Broken tack gets a numbered rule of its own, separate from both.

Then the Organisation Rules add the host’s inventory, and its length is the surprise: flood lighting, a sound system, a power supply, referee materials, spectator stands, first aid, notice board, commentator, and horses for the mounted official. Twenty-three sections, of which only a handful are about the game.

Set that beside the player’s own kit, which comes down to a helmet, a ball and a strap, and the balance is clear. Horseball is cheap to play and expensive to stage, which is the reverse of polo and much of why the sport spread through riding schools rather than clubs.