Sex, sweat and Sloanes

This description comes straight from the pages of a Jilly Cooper novel. But it also describes the scene in front of me today. We are at the afterparty for the Veuve Clicquot Gold Cup at Cowdray Park, the start of several weeks of sporting days and champagne-filled nights. Welcome to the wonderful world of polo.

Every July, the pretty, hedgerow-fringed village of Midhurst in Sussex plays host to the Gold Cup, one of the most prestigious events in the English season, and the country lanes become filled with flash new sports cars and oversized four-wheel drives. The players and their hangers-on stay at The Spread Eagle - aptly named, as it turns out; the bar is soon packed with unnaturally tall young men and women, invariably blond, invariably with pots of money and very high sex drives. The corridors in the early hours reverberate with the mating call of the privileged: the popping of corks accompanied by loud, braying laughter. At an after-match party held in a marquee on the Sunday night, a girl in a pink dress is gyrating between the thighs of a well-built young man with floppy hair, equine teeth and ruddy cheeks.

And therein lies the problem. Polo is a very competitive, highly skilled sport that is sometimes dangerous and always expensive - think Formula 1, but without wheels. And we have many up-and-coming young players who are actually world class.

More than 10,000 people queued up and paid £15 per car to watch the action at Cowdray Park. But as we discovered as we trailed the posh polo posse throughout the summer months, it is proving very hard to shake off the image that the sport is too snobby and sexy for its own good.

The PR for the Gold Cup is reluctant to grant us a press pass, in case we write anything about the naughty goings-on. "The sport is trying to get away from that image," says spokeswoman Liz Higgins. "I would rather it was only written about in the sports pages, not Life&Style."

On the sidelines at Cowdray, the New Gloucestershire Young (NGY), the upper-class crowd who follow the sport, are unpacking hampers.

The girls are glamorous and gorgeous - flat midriffs above scruffy jeans and expensive shoes, or bare-armed in colourful little Chloe dresses. Their hair is shiny and expensively highlighted.

The boys are less imaginative in their choice of dress, but no less confident. The glare from several hundred pairs of mirrored Oakley sunglasses - worn, Prince William-style, on the top of the head - - is dazzling. While the cooler kids opt for battered denim - like the unfeasibly monikered Jacobi Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe, a dashing 19-year-old player, and his friend, 21-year-old James Beim, the epitome of ruddy cheeked poshness - the uniform for the boys is mostly chinos, a navy blazer, pink or blue-and-white checked shirts, deck shoes or loafers (worn sockless) and a gold signet ring.

The parents are identical - - the fathers add only a jaunty Panama hat; the mothers are a little more sun-creased and speckled about the thorax. And, of course, the universal accessory du jour is a bottle of bubbly.

"There are matches every day and you move from one to the other, staying with friends and getting rat-arsed," says one 20-year-old university student from Bristol, a member of the NGY. "In our circle, players are babe magnets. Though at some point you try to fit in a week at Rock in Cornwall and a fortnight on somebody's dad's yacht."

In term time, the NGYs can be found on the campuses of not only Bristol but also Durham, Edinburgh and St Andrews, and the Royal Agricultural College at Cirencester. During the polo season they circulate between matches at Cowdray, Cirencester, Beaufort - where Princes Harry and William beat their father 3-2 recently - and the Guards club at Windsor, home to the Cartier International on the last weekend in July.

Pretty young blondes including Louisa Welby-Everard, Isabella Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe, Lizzy Ward and Emma Lippiat invariably turn up when the young princes are playing, but they don't seem too impressed by the action on the field, or by the princes' skills with a mallet - they both have a handicap of 0 (the usual range is from 2 to 10).

William isn't a great player because he is left-handed, but Harry is fearless.

"There are plenty of chukka chicks, as we call them," says Cheryl Bicket, polo manager at Cowdray Park, referring to the periods of time each match is divided up into. "Many of the players have this slight arrogance that some girls find very attractive. And there is a lot of power and money attached to the game, which is irresistible."

But the professional players are getting cheesed off with their sport's image. "It is a bit galling, because we do work bloody hard and 90 per cent of our audience don't even really know we exist," says one professional player. Polo aficionados are divided as to whether the princes are good for the game. "In some ways it's great, because they bring us so much publicity," says Mark Tomlinson, a Hugh Grant lookalike and, at only 19, one of Britain's best young players, "but they perpetuate an elitist image. Most people think you have to be rich to play polo, which is simply not the case, although you do have to own a couple of horses, and fields and stables, I suppose."

A string of ponies can, in fact, cost tens of thousands of pounds a year, but most professionals are actually guns for hire, paid a salary by the rich "patrons" who run their own teams. Like tennis players, they follow the sun, and at the end of the English season move on to play in Spain, Argentina, Palm Springs in the USA and Australia.

It is a gruelling circuit, and although the number of celebrities - The Queen, Prince Andrew, Lauren Bush, Colin Firth and Tara Palmer-Tomkinson - who turned up to watch England narrowly lose to the Commonwealth at the Cartier polo at Windsor last weekend in glorious sunshine was great publicity, the score (11-10) barely got a mention.

Only the Argentinians ever reach the top level of a 10-goal handicap, though Britain has a couple of talented sevens - Henry Brett, a floppy-haired 26-year-old with not only a fearless skill but also good looks, who has started dating Lady Tamara Grosvenor, eldest daughter of the Duke of Westminster, and Satnam Dhillon, with a five-goal handicap, based in Cirencester, who has the potential to reach the top.

The two polo dynastys - the Tomlinsons, based at Beaufort, near their friend Prince Charles's home at Highgrove, and the Vesteys, who made their money in the meat industry - have spawned some of our best players. Luke Tomlinson is 24, a five-goal professional, and his brother Mark, 19, a student at Bristol, is also accomplished. Tamara Vestey, 26, is already a professional, and her sister, Nina, 19, is considered our most talented female player.

At the Cartier after-party hosted in a huge marquee by Chinawhite, Henry Brett is making the most of his celebrity status, working his way along a queue of adoring beauties. A boy whose voice has just broken pushes past, free champagne in hand, shouting "Get me a bird!"

We could be back in Jilly Cooper land.