Bicycle polo replaces the horse with the two-wheeled bike for a mount, grassy pitches for hard asphalt .
Bike polo - in Newington Park on Harper Road, just off Newington Causeway near Elephant and Castle. 01 04 2009 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 mustache 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." The first bicycle polo matches however were more tranquil affairs, played in the late 19th century by British colonial police in India who used bikes to practice their polo skills when horses weren't available. Bike polo once even featured as an exhibition sport in the 1908 Olympic games. But after reaching the height of its popularity in Europe the 1930s it fell into decline after World War Two, only to be resurrected by the cycle-courier communities of North America and Europe in the 1980s.
Size: 4256px × 2832px
Location: Newington Park on Harper Road, just off Newington Causeway near Elephant and Castle
Photo credit: © roger parkes / Alamy / Afripics
License: Licensed
Model Released: No
Keywords: bike, bicycle, bike, bikes, colourful, custom, cycle, discs, fashion, fixed, fixxies, gear, gritty, hipster, hipsters, london, polo, rear, scene, single, speed, sport, trends, trendy, urban, wheel, wheels
