Ladies and Gentlemen, A new sport has been formed off the back of Bike Polo
Melbourne Bike Polo ran a three game demonstration match at RMIT University building 45 for the Matchpoint.Melbourne exhibition on how to re use urban spaces for sporting purposes which included Bike Polo.
After we played our demo match, some kids were rolling around on the chairs, others joined in. They started knocking the ball around. More people grabbed a chair and the nearest stick they could find and joined in. This is when the first recorded game of Chair Polo was conceived.
The players were given a quick run down of some basic rules and swapped out most of the heavy wooden blocks for Polo mallets, reset the ball to the middle and counted down 3,2,1,Kill!
Holy crap, what an awesome spectacle!
The number of moves was amazing. You can push players away with the back of your chair, hook your mallet on to their chair leg and spin them around, kick the ball away with your feet, goalies could lay their mallets/sticks flat to defend the goals, no holds barred! The only rule is if you stand up off your seat or fall off, you have to tap back in at centre court (a la polo)
Enjoy some of the raw footage captured here
I was at “Saturday InDesign” in Melb a few years ago and one of the bigger showrooms, possibly living edge, had a mini chair-hockey tournament running. Looked like great fun!