CARTIER QUEEN’S CUP POLO

The Cartier Queen’s Cup is the leading polo tournament of Guards Polo Club, played over four weeks of May and June in Windsor Great Park and decided in a final on a Sunday in mid-June. Queen Elizabeth II gave the club its silver cup in 1960, for its fifth birthday, and for decades presented it herself.

Her husband was twice beaten in the final. Her son won it.

Smith’s Lawn

The club was founded on 25 January 1955 as the Household Brigade Polo Club, and took its present name in 1969. The Duke of Edinburgh was its president from the first day until his death in 2021, and the King took the office in 2024.

Its home is Smith’s Lawn, which is thought to take its name from a gamekeeper of the Restoration. The clubhouse looks over the Queen’s Ground, where the final is played, and two more grounds, deeper in the park at Flemish Farm, have Windsor Castle behind them.

The first final was played in June 1960, in pouring rain. The Centaurs, the team of Evelyn de Rothschild, beat Cowdray Park by eight goals to two and a half, the half given on handicap.

The cup is small, twelve and a half centimetres high, with Her Majesty The Queen’s Cup engraved on one side and the royal arms on the other, and the winners’ names go on the silver bands of its ebonised base. Its hallmarks, struck at Chester, date it to 1920, forty years before the Queen gave it.

The Duke of Edinburgh, who reached a handicap of five goals, took his team, Windsor Park, to the final in 1964 and in 1966, and lost both. Prince Charles won it in 1986, with Les Diables Bleus.

Cartier has given the tournament its name since 2012.

The Final

A polo handicap runs up to ten goals, the highest there is, and a team’s four players may add up to twenty-two. Most teams belong to a patron, who plays in them, usually at a handicap of nothing.

Some twenty teams play through the leagues from the middle of May. The last two meet on the Queen’s Ground on a Sunday afternoon in mid-June, after the subsidiary final, for the Cartier Trophy, in the morning.

A match is six chukkas of about seven minutes. At half-time the crowd walks out onto the ground to tread in the divots.

Cartier gives prizes to the most valuable player and to the best pony.

Adolfo Cambiaso, the Argentine, has won it more often than anyone, and in 2024 played in it beside his daughter, Mia, the first father and daughter to do so.

In 2026 Balanz Capital won it at their first attempt, beating Aureus by seventeen goals to seven.

What to Know

The semi-finals are on the Wednesday before the final, and the final is on the Sunday afternoon.

A lounge suit. The club asks for smart casual on the ground and a jacket at its lunches, and the Court dresses one level above.

The club is private, but the final is a ticketed day. Every seat in the grandstands is allotted, and tables in the clubhouse, overlooking the Queen’s Ground, are gone weeks ahead. A pass for the car park comes with the grass behind the car, for a picnic.

Trains from Waterloo stop at Egham, Virginia Water and Sunningdale, each a short taxi ride from the ground, and Heathrow is twenty minutes by car. Stay in Windsor, or in London.

The mistake is to stay in one’s seat at half-time, when the crowd goes out onto the Queen’s Ground to tread in the divots. Glasses stay behind.

The Court

The Queen’s Cup is not the Court’s own. Places in the clubhouse for the final, overlooking the Queen’s Ground, are sought on a member’s behalf, and the Court arranges the whole of it: getting there, where to stay in Windsor, and the table afterward. Royal Ascot begins on the Tuesday after, a few miles away.

How one becomes a member is set out under Admission.