Marc Ganzi Audi team captain. Photo credit David Lominska.
Marc Ganzi, one of the world’s top amateur polo players, will compete alongside Prince Harry on Wednesday, May 15th in the Sentebale Royal Salute Polo Cup in Greenwich, Connecticut.
Ganzi and six other polo players will compete with the Prince in the invitation-only polo match sponsored by Sentebale, the Prince’s charity for underprivileged children in Lesotho.
The longtime Audi team captain and 2009 U.S. Open champion will join Prince Harry on the Sentebale Land Rover team along with Michael Carrazza and team captain, Royal Salute Ambassador Malcolm Borwick, a regular on the England national team.
The Sentebale Land Rover team will play the St. Regis polo team, captained by Sentebale’s newly-appointed ambassador, Nacho Figueras, regarded as the face of polo.
Figueras will be joined by teammates Peter Orthwein, chief executive of Thor Industries and founding member of the Greenwich Polo Club; Steve Lefkowitz and Dawn Jones, wife of actor Tommy Lee Jones and top woman’s player in the WCT.
The Greenwich Polo Club will host the charity polo match to be played after a sit-down lunch. Unlike Prince Harry’s 2010 visit to Governors Island for the Veuve Clicquot Polo Classic that attracted 8,000 spectators, only 400 guests have been invited.
“We have gotten calls to be a flag boy,” Peter Brant told the New York Times. Brant, a prominent businessman and art collector, is the founder of the club and avid polo player. His powerhouse White Birch team was a fixture on the Wellington polo scene. “I don’t think anyone sees Prince Harry all the time on the social circuit.”
It has been a busy season for Ganzi, who recently completed the high goal season with Audi and now is in the midst of the spring season at his family’s Grand Champions Polo Club in Wellington.
On July 28th, Ganzi will rub elbows with a few more members of the Royal Family when he heads the U.S. team against England for the coveted Westchester Cup at Guards Polo Club in Windsor Great Park. The last time the two teams met in the UK in 1997, England won, 12-9. At the International Polo Club Palm Beach in 2009, when the Cup was last played, England won, 10-9.
Ganzi, CEO and founder of Global Tower Partners, and his polo teams have won every major 20- and 26-goal polo tournament including the U.S. Open, CV Whitney Cup and Piaget Gold Cup. This past November at Grand Champions, Ganzi’s Team USA defeated England, 8.5-6, in the International Cup.
Prince Harry competes in the Sentebale Polo Cup on March 11th, 2012
Sentebale was founded by Prince Harry and Prince Seeiso of the Lesotho Royal family in 2006 in memory of their mothers to help ease the plight of the neediest and most vulnerable of Lesotho’s children, many of them the victims of poverty and Lesotho’s HIV/AIDs epidemic.
It is the third year Royal Salute has partnered with the charity. The UK hosted the annual flagship fundraising event in 2011 and Brazil hosted in 2012.
The polo field is a world away from the Afghanistan war zone where the British Army captain recently served 20 weeks in an attack helicopter.
Prince Harry opened his weeklong U.S. visit devoted to the wounded victims of war in Washington, D.C. on Thursday in the halls of Congress at an exhibition about land mines, a cause dear to his late mother, Princess Diana.
One of America’s most heroic wounded warriors, Republican Senator John McCain, escorted Prince Harry during the tour.
On Friday the Prince visited Arlington National Cemetary and Walter Reed National Military Medical Center before flying to Colorado Springs for the May 11-16 Warrior Games where he will spend Saturday watching more than 200 American and British veterans wounded or injured in service compete in various sports.
Prince Harry will also visit parts of New Jersey damaged by Superstorm Sandy and stop for events in New York City before ending his visit Wednesday on the polo field.