Photo by Martino's doodles
From Reuters UK:
London bicycle polo ain’t for the genteel set
LONDON (Reuters) - In car parks and concrete football pitches across London, cyclists of all stripes have transformed a badge of the British establishment into their own brand of extreme urban sport.
Bicycle polo replaces the horse with the two-wheeled bike for a mount, grassy pitches for hard asphalt and the elegance of a sport enjoyed by royalty and the rich into a gritty urban pastime for anyone with nerve enough to join the madcap melee.
Out are the riding helmets, gentlemanly attire and finely groomed steeds. In are fixed wheel bikes, gladiatorial-style chanting and a healthy dose of physical contact as two teams of three use improvised mallets to smash a small plastic ball between goals made out of traffic cones.
There is no referee and few fixed rules apart from players suffering a “time out” penalty if their feet leave their pedals and touch the ground. The first team to reach five goals wins.
“It’s like the new football (soccer),” joked 22-year old Max Knight as a fellow player with a waxed moustache and manic look in his eye whizzed past, celebrating a goal by roaring and thumping a mallet made from a golf club and packaging foam into the ground.
“You get people from loads of different places coming down to play all the time. First it was the bike couriers, but now it’s becoming more fashionable and they’re being replaced by students, designers, even lawyers.”
Photo by :: slamm ::
Read on about how this came about. You’ll be surprised about its history.
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