We had ourselves a family day out on Sunday (fortunately, not on Eastlink) and quite by chance we found ourselves in the Carlton Gardens at the same time as the bike polo mob.

Ever since I first head of bike polo I've been mildly curious, without really being motivated to give it a bash. I guess I had the impression of bikes thundering around just like the horses do in…umm…horse polo and along with mallets flailing everywhere and balls rolling around, it just seemed like an accident waiting to happen.

So, in anticipation of some serious schadenfreude, of course we sat down to watch a chukka.

It turned out to be relatively sedate, not the crash and bash that I'd imagined—the worst we saw was a bike being dropped from time to time. I guess it takes a bit of coordination to get the bike going in the right direction, at the right pace and swing the mallet accurately. It must be more about timing than raw speed and aggro. With some training and experience, I suppose it would become a quite fast-paced game but with increasing pace would come increasing skill at avoiding trouble (or increasing skill at falling off).

I'm utterly unqualified to comment, other than to say that it did look like heaps of fun. I still think it's a crazy idea but you never know, I might just get down there and give it a go myself—the next time I get one of those mythical "spare" Sunday afternoons.

They play down by the Exhibition Building every Sunday from 1pm, and the bloke that I spoke to on the sideline said that it's mostly scratch games at the moment but they're trying to get an organised competition going, which would be great.

Comments

Grant

I've always wanted to play! IN the states, well the northwest of it anyway there's a species of bike polo known as mini bike polo.

Looks like fun!