Argentina suffers an incurable addiction to sport: its males go cold turkey at the thought of even one week without football, and you'll hear informed and spirited debate in bars on sports as diverse as rugby and the uniquely Argentine equestrian sport of pato. The country has few exports as prestigious and reliable as its polo and football players, but other sports have produced stars that have risen to conquer the world stage, typically delighting spectators with their flamboyance in the process - people such as Guillermo Vilas and Gabriela Sabatini in tennis, who reached their peak in the 1970s and 1980s, respectively; Carlos Monzón in boxing; and the legendary motor-racing driver, Juan Manuel Fangio
Pato
The most curious of all Argentine sports is
pato
("duck"), a sport that has its origins in the seventeenth century. The name comes from the original "ball": a trussed duck that the mounted teams would wrestle each other...
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Polo
Of all the major sports played in Argentina,
polo
is the one you're likely to be the least familiar with. First played over two thousand years ago in Ancient Persia, the game became popular in the British Raj, and was adopted in Britain in the...
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Rugby
Argentina has come to enjoy increasing levels of success on the rugby field. Rugby was introduced to Argentina in 1873, and the Argentine Rugby Union was founded in 1899. The country's national squad, the Pumas (founded in 1965), has gone from strength to...
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Football
Football
was introduced to Buenos Aires by British sailors in the 1860s, and by the end of the nineteenth century, amateur clubs had begun to spring up. In 1930, Argentina reached the first World Cup Final, before losing to the hosts, Uruguay, but...
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