Where a polo tour can include a Vanderbilt mansion before breakfast, an ocean swim before lunch, tennis on hallowed grass, caviar aboard a schooner at sunset—and, eventually, an actual polo match.
There are cities that host visiting sports teams. Newport gives them an itinerary.
When international polo players arrive in the City by the Sea, the match may be the official reason stamped on the calendar, but it rarely takes long for Newport to become the other half of the story. Here, a morning can begin beneath the chandeliers of a Gilded Age palace, veer onto an electric bicycle along Ocean Drive, pause for a beach picnic, detour through tennis history, and somehow end aboard a schooner with Champagne and caviar as the sun drops behind a forest of megayachts.
Only in Newport.
And for the visiting teams of Newport Polo’s 150th Diamond Jubilee Season, that has become something of a tradition. Polo may bring them halfway around the world. Newport makes them wonder why they have to leave.
THE SWISS HAVE LANDED
This week, it is Switzerland’s turn.
Philipp, Tom, Cedric and Janik touch down at Boston Logan with the essentials of international travel—kit bags, mallets and considerable anticipation—before Rockstar Limo whisks them south to Newport. Waiting at the center of the action is Forty 1° North, their waterfront headquarters, where the harbor practically comes through the windows and the yachts provide a fairly persuasive argument against an early bedtime.
It is an enviable introduction to America’s First Resort. But Newport has barely begun showing off.
With boots on the ground, the Swiss itinerary quickly becomes a master class in the peculiar excesses of this little island. First, a perfectly respectable break-in at The Breakers—by ticket, naturally—to inspect what happened when Gilded Age industrial fortunes collided with Italian Renaissance architecture and absolutely no one suggested restraint.
The escape route is Cliff Walk, where mansions occupy one side and the Atlantic pounds the rocks on the other. Few places make it quite so easy to contemplate robber-baron economics while being sprayed with sea foam.
Then the pace changes. Island Adventures puts the players on electric bikes for a dash through the harbor as the Newport International Boat Show comes alive, before sending them toward Ocean Drive and one of its sheltered beaches. Suddenly four international polo players accustomed to crossing a field at speed are reduced to the essential Newport pursuits: swimming, sunning and deciding when lunch should appear.
Fortunately, Elizabeth in Newport has that last matter under control, with a bespoke picnic in an iconic setting awaiting the hungry adventurers.
And because merely being accomplished polo players apparently isn’t sporting enough, there is tennis at the International Tennis Hall of Fame, where Newport’s sporting pedigree predates almost everyone in the group, followed by a look at another variety of horsepower amid the gleaming machinery of the Audrain Automobile Museum.
Then—yes—there is finally polo. Thursday evening brings the Swiss to Newport Polo’s tournament grounds in Portsmouth for a Friendship Tournament with local players. It is part practice, part introduction and part international icebreaker conducted at considerably higher speed than most cocktail parties. Afterward come lobster rolls, chowder, local players and the easy fieldside camaraderie that has turned so many visiting opponents into lifelong Newport friends.
This is the curious thing about Newport Polo: the rivalry tends to last six chukkers. The friendships have proven considerably more stubborn.
THEN NEWPORT DEPLOYS ITS SECRET WEAPON: THE HARBOR
Friday brings the elephant—or perhaps the megayacht—in the room: the Newport International Boat Show. For a Swiss delegation from a famously landlocked country, Newport has thoughtfully arranged several acres of floating temptation.
The team can wander docks, displays and tents before taking to the harbor themselves, with Sea Newport providing the sort of private cruise that makes an afternoon disappear alarmingly quickly. There may be a swim. There will certainly be boats. And everywhere is the maritime theater that explains why Newport’s relationship with the sea is less a recreational interest than a personality trait.
Then comes golden hour. As the Boat Show begins to quiet and the harbor changes from blue to pink and gold, the Swiss are welcomed aboard a celebrated schooner of Newport Experience for an intimate cocktail soirée overlooking the megayachts.
This is Newport diplomacy at its most effective. Champagne. Calvisius caviar presented by Caviar Society. White sails. Swiss polo players. A schooner at sunset. Neutrality never stood a chance.
Glasses clink while the harbor lights begin to appear, and people who were strangers an hour earlier discover that international relations improve dramatically when conducted on deck with bubbles and caviar.
Eventually the Swiss Set goes ashore, bound for the Clarke Cooke House, that wonderfully Newport institution where dinner has an uncanny tendency to become drinks, drinks become dancing, and nobody remembers precisely when the evening changed departments.
By then, there is only one subject nobody can entirely avoid. Tomorrow, they play USA.
SATURDAY MORNING: THE CALM BEFORE THE CHUKKERS
Match Day in most sports means concentration, seclusion and perhaps a carefully calibrated carbohydrate.
In Newport, apparently, it can mean flying a kite at Brenton Point.
Saturday morning remains open for one final raid on the island’s pleasures. Some may disappear into The Breakers or Marble House. Others can collect something gloriously aerodynamic from Newport Kites and head for Brenton Point, where the wind off the Atlantic has been humiliating amateur kite flyers for generations. And on this gameday, Newport Kites will bring an exhibition to Newport Polo!
There are beaches for a last swim, harbor walks, shops, cafés and enough distractions to make one briefly forget that four o’clock brings an international polo match.
Then the whites come out. The mallets are loaded. And Newport’s charming little holiday abruptly becomes USA vs. Switzerland.
NEWPORT IS THEIR OYSTER
The Swiss itinerary is only the latest chapter in a phenomenon that has quietly become one of the great pleasures of Newport Polo’s international tradition.
Ask former visiting players what they remember and the answer isn’t necessarily the score.
They remember Tree of Life, the magnificent 92-foot sailing yacht whose own story includes two circumnavigations of the globe. They remember lobster rolls after polo. Ocean Drive with the top down. Cliff Walk. Harbor sunsets. Tennis. Mansions. Swimming between engagements. Long dinners with people who had been opponents hours earlier.
They remember discovering that Newport rewards curiosity.
A visiting team can tour the Newport Mansions, explore the island under the guidance of Newport Jaguar Tours, play tennis on legendary courts, board one of Newport’s ticketed sails, attempt kiteboarding with Adventure Kiteboarding School, open a beautifully packed beach picnic from Elizabeth in Newport, or disappear among the vines for lunch and a tasting at Newport Vineyards.
There are the famous attractions, certainly. But Newport’s real trick lies in the spaces between them.
A hidden beach at the end of a ride. A harbor launch slipping between yachts. A cup of chowder after six chukkers. The view from Cliff Walk when the light changes. A schooner deck at sunset. The moment a visiting player realizes that the person pouring his drink will be cheering against him tomorrow.
And sometimes the greatest luxury is simply the ability to turn down an unfamiliar street and find something extraordinary at the end of it.
THE JOURNEY IS PART OF THE MATCH
That may explain why Newport’s international polo rivalries have endured for 35 seasons.
The visiting players do not simply arrive, compete and depart. They enter Newport.
For a few days, they become part of its peculiar collision of worlds: old money and bare feet, Gilded Age palaces and lobster shacks, superyachts and surfboards, museum-quality automobiles and bicycles, international sport and picnics on the grass.
They come to play polo at America’s first polo club and discover that the city surrounding it has been entertaining visitors for nearly as long.
And so Switzerland’s final international challenge of this Diamond Jubilee summer becomes something larger than six chukkers on Saturday afternoon. It is another passport stamped in a 150-year story of horses, travel, rivalry and friendship.
By the time the Swiss finally leave Newport, there will be photographs from the mansions, stories from the harbor, new friends at the polo grounds, perhaps evidence of questionable kite-flying technique—and one score that will enter the record books.
But experience suggests that years from now, when someone asks them about Newport, the score may not be the first thing they remember.
They will remember the schooner at sunset. The Champagne. The horses. The harbor. The friends.
And that extraordinary long weekend when they came halfway around the world to play a polo match—and Newport refused to let it be just a polo match.