Pilot did exactly what Pilot has been doing all spring at the National Polo Center in Wellington — they led from the opening throw-in, never gave the lead back, and on Sunday afternoon they walked off Field One with the silver U.S. Open Polo Championship trophy. The 5 PM ET final ended Pilot 15, BTA 10, in front of a packed Wellington grandstand and an ESPN broadcast carried by Chris Fowler, Kenny Rice, and Adam Snow for the second consecutive year of the USPA Global–ESPN partnership.
Curtis Pilot’s foursome — Curtis Pilot at 0 goals, Camilo Castagnola at 10, Lorenzo Chavanne at 6, Mackenzie Weisz at 7 — wrapped what is now a perfect 2026 Palm Beach season. They’ve taken two of the three legs of the Gauntlet of Polo (the USPA Gold Cup on April 5 and the U.S. Open today), matching their own 2022 feat and reinforcing the line in the Pololine wrap that Pilot “still remains as the only foursome who won the three competitions of the prestigious The Gauntlet of Polo” in the inaugural 2019 season. The 2026 Triple Crown — CV Whitney Cup, Gold Cup, and U.S. Open — was not on the table after CV Whitney went elsewhere, but the two-of-three is the next-best closing image for Wellington’s high-goal season, and it closes the Mar-a-Lago corridor’s polo calendar on the highest possible note.
How the Final Played Out
BTA arrived in their first-ever U.S. Open final after a clean 3-1 league phase that sent them straight into the semifinals, where they dispatched La Dolfina Tamera 16-10 on Wednesday with an opening 4-0 chukker and a fifth-chukker 4-0 burst. Pilot’s path was harder. They came through a penalty shootout earlier in the bracket and beat La Dolfina Tamera in their own quarter, then handled Coca Cola 14-4 in the semis on the back of an 11-2 four-chukker run. The two routes converged Sunday afternoon, and Pilot wasted no time stamping the result.
Score by chukker: 4-1, 6-2, 8-5, 10-8, 13-10, 15-10. Pilot was up four after the first, six after the second, eight after the third, and never trailed. BTA had one real run — in the fourth they closed the gap to 10-8 with a tight pace and Tomás Panelo at 10 goals working in tandem with Ignacio Viana at 7 — but the fifth chukker went 3-2 to Pilot, and the sixth went 2-0. Pilot outscored BTA 5-0 across the closing two chukkers, the kind of finishing run that converts a comfortable lead into a coronation.
MVP and Best Playing Pony
Lorenzo Chavanne was named tournament MVP — his second major individual honor of the 2026 Gauntlet, after taking the same award at the Gold Cup three weeks ago. The Argentine 6-goaler has been the on-field engine of Pilot’s season, anchoring the team between Castagnola’s 10-goal upfield work and Weisz’s American 7-goal versatility. Best Playing Pony went to Texas, ridden by Chavanne. That makes Chavanne the rider behind both Pilot’s 2026 BPP awards — V8 Tyson at the Gold Cup and Texas at the U.S. Open — and underscores the depth of the Chavanne string this spring.
The BTA Picture
BTA’s 7-goaler Ignacio Viana, 10-goaler Tomás Panelo, KC Krueger at 1, and Steve Krueger at 5 added to a 23-goal lineup matching Pilot’s exact handicap. The match was never an upset on paper — both rosters totaled 23 — but Pilot’s chukker management told the story. BTA’s first U.S. Open final ends with a runner-up finish that is, for the program, a genuine accomplishment: from a 3-1 league phase through a 16-10 semifinal to a 10-point performance against the best Gauntlet team of the season. The Krueger family operation walked out of Wellington with the kind of season that reframes 2027 expectations.
What This Means for the Pony Market
The asset-side read on a U.S. Open Sunday is almost always the same: the off-season pony market opens Monday morning, and the names that finished Sunday at the top of the play card become the names that move first. Texas, the BPP, becomes a string-anchor offer for any program looking to acquire from the Chavanne stable. The MVP-and-BPP double through Chavanne is the kind of branding event that compresses negotiation windows on the broader Pilot string into early-May, not late-summer. For Wellington-based operations watching the trade calendar — and for the Palm Beach financial-services and asset-backed lending desks that fund those acquisitions — the closing weekend of the Gauntlet is a calendar event in its own right. Sunday’s result hardens the price floor on the top end of the Argentine import market for the second straight cycle.
The Calendar After Sunday
The Wellington high-goal season closes here. The U.S. Open final is the last marquee throw-in on the Palm Beach polo calendar before the corridor migrates north for summer — Greenwich, Aiken, the U.K. — and the social calendar in Palm Beach pivots to Worth Avenue, Cavallino’s fall planning, and the run-up to the November Breakers and Cavallino Classic windows. Sunday’s grandstands felt like a closing-night audience, and the trophy presentation — perpetual cup care of the Museum of Polo and Hall of Fame in Lake Worth — closed the season the way Wellington has closed it every year since 2004, when the U.S. Open relocated permanently to South Florida from a long itinerant period through Oak Brook, San Antonio, and Meadowbrook.
For Pilot, the result writes the 2026 chapter cleanly: a perfect Wellington season, a second Gauntlet of three, a Chavanne MVP, and a Texas BPP. For BTA, it writes a different chapter — one that ends with Wellington’s first runner-up plate the Krueger program has ever taken home from a U.S. Open final. Both walked off Field One with material to build on. The trophy stays in Pilot’s care until next April, and the perpetual cup goes back to Lake Worth.
Final result: Pilot 15, BTA 10. MVP: Lorenzo Chavanne. BPP: Texas (ridden by Chavanne). Venue: Stadium Field One, National Polo Center, 3667 120th Avenue South, Wellington, Florida. Broadcast: ESPN (Chris Fowler / Kenny Rice / Adam Snow), with ESPN2 May replay window and international distribution via Star Sports India and beIN Sports.