The highly popular King’s Cup Elephant Polo Tournament will be celebrating its tenth anniversary this year and will be moving to the royal seaside town of Hua Hin in Thailand. The event which will bring the best of the last decade of the popular sporting event will take place from September 5 to September 11 and promises to have nail-biting action both on and off field.
The event will see a number of teams go trunk to trunk to win the coveted King’s Cup trophy. The tournament was introduced to Thailand in 2001 by Anantara Resorts and is a charitable event that raises money for the benefit of all Thailand’s elephants.
Now in its tenth year the King’s Cup Elephant Polo Tournament has gone from a small two-day event with six teams into a week-long extravaganza, which in 2010 featured 12 teams from four continents, encompassing 40 players from at least 15 countries.
To date the tournament has raised over US$300,000 primarily for the National Elephant Institute, which provides medical care, sustenance, employment, and mahout training to Thailand’s elephant population. In recent years, the funds were used to custom build and run an elephant ambulance as well as provide housing at the Centre’s elephant hospital allowing it to offer free accommodation as well as medical treatment to any sick elephants in Thailand; these funds also provided a mobile veterinary centrifuge for their mobile elephant clinic. Proceeds from the 2009 and 2010 tournaments have been used to ‘rescue rent’ five street elephants to be trained in occupational therapy as part of a joint Thai Elephant Conservation Centre, Chiang Mai University project investigating the benefits of using elephants to treat Autism.
It is estimated that Thailand has around 3,600 domesticated elephants and 1,500 wild elephants. The Tourism Authority of Thailand (TAT) fully endorses the King’s Cup Elephant Polo tournament, having identified it as one of the country’s prime annual special events. It will take place on grounds adjacent to Anantara Hua Hin Resort & Spa, and spectator entrance is free.
For more information on King’s Cup Elephant Polo, please visit www.anantaraelephantpolo.com
