Claire Janet Tomlinson has become one of the most successful women polo players and most influential polo coaches today.
Background
Claire Tomlinson is the daughter of Ethel and Arthur Lucas, founder of Wolmers Park Polo Club who was instrumental in the revival of polo in England after the Second World War. When she was told that the Oxford University Polo team was short of players, her father"s approval was obtained, and she took up polo seriously.
Career
She was the highest-rated female polo player, and coached the English national team she once captained. She went from Wycombe Abbey to take A levels at Millfield, and while there she was selected for the British junior fencing team Going on to study agricultural economis at Somerville College, Oxford, it was not long before she was awarded a squash blue and a fencing half-blue and got short-listed for the Olympic fencing team
Her participation in the Varsity Match 1964 as the very first female player was a milestone in the history of the match.
Cautiously the club had entered her as Mr Lucas. In 1966, she became the very first female captain of OUPC. In her final year at university, she was rated at nought-goals.
Her first job for a British company brought her to Buenos Aires, Argentina. She became one of polo’s few true masters of the number one position and the first woman in the world to rise to five goals in 1986.
She swept away the rule forbidding women in British high-goal and became the first to compete on equal terms with men at the top tier.
And all this despite the fact that her handicap was higher than of many other male participants in the Queen"s and Gold Cup. She still holds the women's high goal handicap record today. Claire is the Chairman of the Beaufort Polo Club which she and Simon Tomlinson reestablished in 1989.
In 1993 with Hugh Dawnay she instigated and set up a coaching system for the H.P.A. She also taught the Duke of Cambridge and Prince Harry at Beaufort.
Claire has also been successfully breeding polo ponies since the 1970s and is pro-active with the modern breeding programme presently in operation, which includes Beaufort Embryo Transfer. She is one of six official H.P.A. team coaches, and regularly coaches British squads at F.I.P. championships as well as holding sessions for the H.P.A. Junior Development Squad at Down Farm.