Juan Miles

Juan Miles was the back in the 1924 Argentinian Olympic gold-medal winning team that clinched victory with a 6-5 win over the United States in the round-robin series that effectively secured his country’s gold medal.

Miles started playing Polo at the age of 20 in 1915 and he won the Argentine Open, when it was called the River Plate Championship, with North Santa Fe the following year and again in 1917. He won it again, with Las Rosas, in 1919 and 1923 by which time his handicap had risen from three to seven, his brother David played alongside him in all four championship winning teams. David was a 9-handicap player but was sadly killed in a plane crash in 1934.

Juan had a natural talent for the sport and his handicap eventually rose to nine. In 1922 he was on the Argentine Federation side that won the Hurlingham Challenge Cup and Roehampton Open in England, and then the US Open. He played for Argentina in the inaugural Cup of the Americas in 1928 when he was also on the winning US Open side at Meadow Brook. The Copa Juan Miles was inaugurated in his honour in 1984 and is contested by teams eliminated in the Copa Provincia de Buenos Aires. His son David also played polo and was to become the captain and then president of Argentina’s Hurlingham Club.