Bike Polo Urban steed
Put the ponies out to pasture, leave your pretence at the door: hardcourt bike polo is not a blue-blooded sport.
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Don’t let the name fool you. Hardcourt bike polo might call to mind a certain princely sport invented in Persia around 600BC – and later carried across the globe by colonial plantation owners, mustachioed cavalry officers and Argentine aristocrats – but if you show up at a practice expecting kitten-heeled spectators, a table of silver trophies and a tent serving Pimm’s and Pommery then you’re in for a shock.
It’s a weekday evening and a post-work crowd of urban bike-lovers are cracking open cans of Red Stripe around the perimeter of a tarmac playground where the inner-city London boroughs of Hackney and Islington meet. Here, among the council blocks and anti-climb paint, this underground sport is growing up like a bastard kid; pony polo may well be its mother, but reprobate youth culture is certainly the dad.
With its distinctively urban context, hardcourt polo shares common ground with hip hop, that Bronx-born movement that owes its existence to a confluence of deprivation, ingenuity and improvisation. Underfunded schools could offer turntables but not musical instruments, while the sides of subway trains stood in for artists’ canvasses. Out of this scarcity of resources came the underground expressions of scratching, graffiti, beatboxing and breakdancing, with early innovators literally making something out of nothing.
Bike polo may be less about economic deprivation, but the dearth of space and resources that goes hand-in-hand with urban life – and the brand of scrappy ingenuity that it engenders – is the same. And much like hip hop’s global growth, hardcourt bike polo is flourishing like some kind of tenacious weed that springs up in the cracks of an untended asphalt surface. It got its start in 1999 in Seattle and by 2002 had spread to the bike-loving city of Portland. Two years later it popped up in New York, and by 2006 it had touched down in London.
So what’s the secret to its runaway success? As humanity tries desperately to wean itself off a destructive addiction to oil, two wheels have never held quite so much appeal. Cycle couriers are credited with the birth of hardcourt polo, and it’s not hard to see why. The skill-sets they’ve honed to navigate the urban environment (tight turns, stopping on a dime, standing still while poised on pedals and steering through miniscule gaps) are perfectly suited to this modern manifestation of the game.
Matt Bibby, who works as a designer for the streetwear label Chunk, remembers being instantly mesmerised upon first catching sight of bike polo three years ago: “I only came across the game because I was walking down the road with a couple of friends. We saw all these bikes gracefully gliding around in the sun chasing a ball.” Matt now plays at least once a week, while Chunk has made a habit of sponsoring both teams and tournaments.
In a world where technology, rules and hierarchy in sport are spiralling out of control, hardcourt polo is refreshingly straightforward. “We keep it simple,” says Matt. “Three people on a team, no foot-downs on the ground. If you do, the penalty is touching out at the sides in the middle.
“The biggest rule is, ‘Don’t be a dick,’” Matt says. “So if someone started throwing their weight around or getting out of line, everyone would just reel them in. And you don’t want to be that guy anyway; you don’t want to turn up in front of thirty or forty peers, friends and people you don’t even know and be the one everyone hates on.”
Back at the Red Stripe-fuelled meet-up, though, the absence of a winners’ podium hasn’t diminished the compulsion to play. But first, cones must be found to serve as goal markers. When I ask where they’ll get cones at this time of night, one two-wheeled bandit grins, “They’re donated by the local council!” Within minutes the pack returns with the desired contraband in hand, and he announces, “Philanthropy – modern philanthropy in action, that’s what it is.”
Resembling a tribe of urban Robin Hoods, the merry band gets down to business. Somewhere far away on a green expanse of real estate, bike polo’s pony-based predecessor is no doubt carrying on its traditions among pricey horseflesh, full-time grooms and magnums of Champagne. Here, however, the satisfying sound of ball against plastic is followed by a ‘ping’ as the projectile finds a chain-link fence. There are high-speed chases and instant emergency stops, crashing, weaving, scraping and scrapping as the quarry wiggles free. Occasionally the ball becomes airborne before being tamed again by the pack of hungry cyclists, circling like piranhas in a rough sea of grey tower blocks and crumbling concrete. They sail around smoothly before one casually, but decisively, puts the little orb between the traffic cones.
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Bike Polo (text) by Shannon Denny is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
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