Prince Harry watched King Charles III‘s life being saved by a fellow polo player as a boy—and in later life the memory prompted his own dramatic intervention.
The Duke of Sussex described in his book Spare how it looked like his father had fallen asleep after he was thrown from his horse while playing the sport, popular with successive generations of royals.
However, the king had in fact swallowed his tongue and it required another player to spot him struggling before his airway was cleared and he could breathe again.
Tim Graham Photo Library via Getty Images
Harry remembered the incident when he was deciding whether to seize the day and go on a boys’ holiday to Las Vegas, despite concerns it might be “risky.”
“I’d had an experience, recently, that made me think they weren’t altogether wrong, that carpe diem was more than empty words,” he wrote.
“Playing polo that spring in Brazil, to raise money for Sentebale (Harry’s African charity for young people in Lesotho and Botswana), I’d seen a player take a hard fall from his horse.
“As a boy, I’d seen Pa take that same fall, the horse giving way, the ground simultaneously smacking and swallowing him.
“I remembered thinking: Why’s Pa snoring? And then someone yelling: He’s swallowed his tongue!
“A quick-thinking player jumped from his horse and saved Pa’s life. Recalling that moment, subconsciously, I’d done likewise: jumped off my horse, run to the man, pulled out his tongue.”
King Charles later described his near death experience, in 2001, in a TV interview with U.K. hosts Ant and Dec: “I was trying too hard, and I had to turn the pony very fast and the next thing I mean the thing the pony came down sideways and I must have landed absolutely smack on my head.
“Anyway, completely felled me and I ended up being taken to hospital where I finally woke up.”
Gesturing at Harry, he said: “This person here told me later that he thought that when I was lying on the ground that I was, he said ‘Papa’s just snoring’ he said.
“And there I was busily swallowing my tongue, quietly dying! That was the last time I played with them. They tried to kill me so they could walk off with my ponies,” he joked.
The drama came just four years after Harry and William lost their mother in a car crash in Paris on August 31, 1997.
At the time of the polo accident, in August 2001, CBS quoted spokesman Patrick Harrison saying: “He was unconscious for a very brief time, was taken to the hospital and is now being transferred to Cheltenham General Hospital where he will stay for a precautionary overnight stay.”
It was not the king’s first polo accident, however, as he also broke his right arm in two places in 1990.
In Spare, Harry described how such injuries had left Charles having to do headstands to help straighten his back out.
“Prescribed by his physio,” he wrote, “these exercises were the only effective remedy for the constant pain in Pa’s neck and back.
“Old polo injuries, mostly. He performed them daily, in just a pair of boxers, propped against a door or hanging from a bar like a skilled acrobat.
“If you set one little finger on the knob you’d hear him begging from the other side: No! No! Don’t open! Please God don’t open!”
Jack Royston is Newsweek‘s chief royal correspondent based in London. You can find him on X, formerly Twitter, at @jack_royston and read his stories on Newsweek‘s The Royals Facebook page.
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