ADOLFO CAMBIASO

Adolfo Cambiaso has scored more goals in the Argentine Open than anyone, 1,083 in 128 matches, and his titles there run from 1994 to 2025. He is from Cañuelas, in the province of Buenos Aires, where La Dolfina, the team and the breeding operation he built, has its ground. In 2026 he goes to Palermo again as one of the holders.

The Handicap

He played his first match at Palermo on 7 November 1992, for Ellerstina, and scored sixteen goals, then a record for a match in the Open. In 1994 Ellerstina won the Triple Corona, the opens of Tortugas, Hurlingham and Palermo, and he was raised to ten goals, the highest handicap there is, at nineteen: the youngest player to reach it until Facundo Pieres in 2005. He then held ten goals without a break for twenty-eight years, from 1994 to 2022, and is rated ten again.

La Dolfina

At twenty-five he set up a breeding business of his own, and the team, La Dolfina, which he founded with Bartolomé Castagnola. It won the Argentine Open in 2002, by twenty goals to sixteen, and he scored sixteen of them, a record for a final. The final of 2005, which La Dolfina won by twenty to nineteen against Ellerstina, is the highest-scoring there has been; he scored fifteen, among them the golden goal in extra time.

In 2015 La Dolfina won the Triple Corona for the third year running, the first team to do so. With Pablo Mac Donough, Juan Martín Nero and David Stirling, at forty goals, it won the Open six times in a row, from 2015 to 2020. In 2024, at forty-nine, he played his thirty-second Open, a record, and said “Estoy viejo”, I am old. In 2025 La Dolfina joined with La Natividad, the team that had beaten it in the finals of 2023 and 2024, and La Natividad La Dolfina won the 132nd Open by seventeen goals to thirteen against Ellerstina Indios Chapaleufú, and with it his fifth Triple Corona.

The Horses

He has bred his own ponies since he was twenty-five, and his farms hold nearly a thousand horses. Colibrí, the horse that carried him to ten goals and his first Palermo title, gives its name to the prize for the best horse in the final of the Copa Diamante, played on his own ground. His mare Cuartetera, which he called the best he ever played, was cloned, in a venture he began in 2010 with Crestview Genetics; on 18 November 2017, in his hundredth match at Palermo, he played seven chukkas on one of her clones and the last on the original mare. In 2012 Queen Elizabeth II gave him an award for his work in encouraging horses to be trained without violence, in a country where breaking a horse had once meant pain and distress.

England and America

The English season knows him as well. He has won the Gold Cup at Cowdray, the British Open, nine times, and the Cartier Queen’s Cup at Guards more often than anyone; his tenth Queen’s Cup, in 2017, was a record. He has won the US Open ten times. In Argentina he holds twelve Olimpia de Plata awards for polo, the Olimpia de Oro as the country’s sportsman of 2014, and the Konex Platinum award for polo in 2000, 2010 and 2020.

Palermo, 2026

The 133rd Argentine Open is to be played by the holders at forty goals, with Camilo and Bartolomé Castagnola, his nephews, and his son, Adolfo, alongside him, every one of the four rated ten. The schedule published in May set the final for 12 December, but the start is being moved for the papal visit, and the new dates are not yet official.

The Court follows polo from Windsor and Cowdray in summer to Palermo at the year’s end, and his name is in the record books of all three. It values him for that: thirty years at the top of a game played on horses he bred himself.