Carrasco Polo Club is a Uruguayan

sports club A sports club or sporting club, sometimes an athletics club or sports society or sports association, is a group of people formed for the purpose of playing sports. Sports clubs range from organisations whose members play together, unpaid, and ...

from the Carrasco neighbourhood of

Montevideo Montevideo () is the Capital city, capital and List of cities in Uruguay, largest city of Uruguay. According to the 2011 census, the city proper has a population of 1,319,108 (about one-third of the country's total population) in an area of . M ...

. Its name references directly the

polo Polo is a ball game played on horseback, a traditional field sport and one of the world's oldest known team sports. The game is played by two opposing teams with the objective of scoring using a long-handled wooden mallet to hit a small hard ...

team and the fact that Carrasco has one of Uruguay's leading equestrian centres. Apart from polo, the club hosts a large variety of sports, such as

equitation Equitation is the art or practice of horse riding or horsemanship. More specifically, equitation may refer to a rider's position while mounted, and encompasses a rider's ability to ride correctly and with effective aids. In horse show competitio ...

field hockey Field hockey is a team sport structured in standard hockey format, in which each team plays with ten outfield players and a goalkeeper. Teams must drive a round hockey ball by hitting it with a hockey stick towards the rival team's shooting ci ...

football Football is a family of team sports that involve, to varying degrees, kicking a ball to score a goal. Unqualified, the word ''football'' normally means the form of football that is the most popular where the word is used. Sports commonly c ...

rugby union Rugby union, commonly known simply as rugby, is a close-contact team sport that originated at Rugby School in the first half of the 19th century. One of the two codes of rugby football, it is based on running with the ball in hand. In its m ...

and

tennis Tennis is a racket sport that is played either individually against a single opponent ( singles) or between two teams of two players each ( doubles). Each player uses a tennis racket that is strung with cord to strike a hollow rubber ball ...

. The rugby union team currently competes in Campeonato Uruguayo, the first division of Uruguayan league system. Carrasco Polo is the most successful rugby club of Uruguay, with 28 championships won. The club's main rival is

Old Christians Old Christian ( es, cristiano viejo, pt, cristão-velho, ca, cristià vell) was a social and law-effective category used in the Iberian Peninsula from the late 15th and early 16th century onwards, to distinguish Portuguese and Spanish people atte ...

History

Carrasco Polo Club was founded as an

equestrian The word equestrian is a reference to equestrianism, or horseback riding, derived from Latin ' and ', "horse". Horseback riding (or Riding in British English) Examples of this are: * Equestrian sports *Equestrian order, one of the upper classes i ...

club in 1933 by 40 former members of recently dissolved Montevideo Polo Club, that had been established 3 years earlier. The first president designed by an assembly was Pedro Barcia, who led the club until 1944. Between 1949 and 1952 Carrasco Polo built its new facilities and polo fields.Institucional - Historia at club website
/ref> In 1949, "rugby criollo" was introduced into the Carrasco Polo Club, which not unlike the

Montevideo Cricket Club The Montevideo Cricket Club (abbreviated "MVCC") is a Uruguayan sports club based in Montevideo, established in 1861 by English immigrants. Its predecessor had been the now defunct "Victoria Cricket Club", founded in 1842.

(MVCC), would become more renowned for rugby than the sport it was named for.Richards, p164, Chapter 9 ''From Muller to Mias'' In 1950, the first edition of Campeonato Uruguayo was held, being contested by Old Boys, Colonia Rugby, and multisport clubs such as the MVCC and Carrasco Polo (which supplied two XVs). Carrasco Polo Club was transformed by the coaching of Amarillo Washington, who used scientific methods to replace the earlier habits of "training hard, but then after matches going to the bar to eat and drink everything."Richards, Chapter 13, ''Resisting the Inevitable'', p236 Carrasco's leading player Diego Ormaechea had been introduced to the sport as a fifteen-year-old in 1976 and was still playing for club and country more than twenty years later. In 1993, Carrasco Polo Club beat a

Buenos Aires Buenos Aires ( or ; ), officially the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires ( es, link=no, Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires), is the capital and primate city of Argentina. The city is located on the western shore of the Río de la Plata, on South ...

squad which included 14

national team A national sports team (commonly known as a national team or a national side) is a team that represents a nation, rather than a particular club or region, in an international sport. The term is most commonly associated with team sports, for exa ...

players. The

2003 Rugby World Cup The 2003 Rugby World Cup was the fifth Rugby World Cup. Originally planned to be hosted by India, all games were shifted to Australia following a contractual dispute over ground signage rights between the Indian Rugby Union and Rugby World Cup ...

finals squad had 12 players from Carrasco Polo Club.

Diego Ormaechea Diego Ormaechea (born 19 July 1959) is a former Uruguayan rugby union player and a current coach. He played as a number eight. Ormaechea is considered the greatest Uruguayan rugby player of all time. His contribution to rugby has been significan ...

, considered the best Uruguayan rugby union player of all time, played all his career at Carrasco. He's currently the head coach of the rugby union team.

Honours

;Rugby union * Campeonato Uruguayo (28): 1952, 1961, 1966, 1981, 1983, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2008, 2009, 2011, 2012, 2014, 2020

Bibliography

* Richards, Huw ''A Game for Hooligans: The History of Rugby Union'' (

Mainstream Publishing Mainstream Publishing was a publishing company in Edinburgh, Scotland. Founded in 1978, it ceased trading in December 2013.Charlotte WilliamsMainstream to cease publishing 1 March 2013, The Bookseller.com' (Retrieved 30 December 2016) It was ass ...

Edinburgh Edinburgh ( ; gd, Dùn Èideann ) is the capital city of Scotland and one of its 32 Council areas of Scotland, council areas. Historically part of the county of Midlothian (interchangeably Edinburghshire before 1921), it is located in Lothian ...

, 2007, )

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Carrasco Polo Club Rugby union teams in Uruguay Football clubs in Montevideo Multi-sport clubs in Uruguay Sport in Montevideo Carrasco, Montevideo 1933 establishments in Uruguay Rugby clubs established in 1933 Polo clubs