The polo court was set up at the end of Melbourne Showgrounds and the edges were made up of temporary fencing and orange construction netting to cover up the gaps.

Follow this link to more photos from the day taken by Rob Booth.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/53446206@N02/

Buying / Selling parts
Discussing rules, courts, building edging / boards, mallets, scoring, ladders
Organisation and running of tournaments
Reviews of polo equipment

This poll will close at midnight on Tuesday the 7th September

Registration for the Australasian Hardcourt Bike Polo Championships 2010 in Brisbane is now open!

Head on over to http://www.bikepolo.com.au/register to register your team or as an individual player

Registrations will close before the tournament and you may not be able to register on the day, so get cracking!

Discussion thread is available here http://www.fixed.org.au/forums/t12861/ on fixed.org

Some of us in Melbourne are looking at flying up on Thursday and arranging a group booking. For further info, speak with Vive.

Rules, Final Flier and Accommodation are in the works. Check back here for an update

A map of the Musgrave Park court is embedded below

View Brisbane Bicycle Polo in a larger map

Scores are as follows
Top center 45
Mortal wombatz 51
Adelaide ACME 53
Polocalypse now 64- sixty f&#ing four!!!! (DFL)
(Results updated from www.whbpc2010.org)

All Australian teams played to the highest levels but were looking up a tall hill and we have a ways to go yet

The tournament here is like the best music festival with all of your favourite bands on all at once

I’m sponsoring Damon to go to the Polo World Championships in Berlin with the bike and win the tournament. After that, he’ll go on to the London Open and then the Australian Championships in Brisbane.

Good luck to Damon and all the guys going to Berlin!! I’m hardly jealous at all

Commuter Cycles is also sponsoring Damon to the value of one super awesome rear tyre and the bike features in an article on their website.

Here’s Damon’s Obligatory Drive Side Shot (ODSS) with a few comments.

Other points of interest: Some of you might have seen the stainless disc guard bolted to integrated mount points. I think the silver guard and cranks nicely counterpoint the bling fork.

North American Hardcourt Polo from Mr.Do on Vimeo.

Bike Polo – EHBPC 2010 in Geneva from Cycle Oxford on Vimeo.

See if you can spot me.

It was a beautiful sunny day with a light fresh breeze. A very welcome break from the chilly winter days recently.

Vive arrived nice and early to set up the boards, bless his cotton socks, and had the court in great shape by the time everyone arrived.

After a few disappointing last minute cancellations it was apparent that we had a mere 4 teams to play. The general consensus was to run Round Robin and then Seeded Single Elimination. The rounds were drawn up and we began play

As promised, there was plenty of delicious dark ale created by Rob’s Home brew factory (TM)

And of course plenty of BBQ goodness including German style sausages, roo snags, vege dogs and vege patties

Our friends from Healsville also brought some fantastic bakery prizes

Human Powered Cycles donated some great prizes, thanks very much Bill!

On to the games!
Team 1: Polonators (Ian, Jem, Dave)
Team 2: Top Centre (Damon, Ray, Leigh)
Team 3: Polocalypse Now (Vive, Tali, RobM)
Team 4: Lazy 88s Sleep Squad (Benee, Sam, Aaron, Kez)

(Lazy 88s photo missing)

Points system
Win = 2 points, Draw = 1 point, Loss = 0 points

Round Robin

First round

First up was Top Centre vs Polonators. Polonators (Jem) scored a very impressive goal during the game but Top Centre were the victors, soundly defeating Polonators 5 to 1
Next was Polocalypse Now vs Lazy 88s formed with Kez, Benee and Sam. It was a hard fought battle with neither team giving an inch, every turn was countered, some spectacular crashes involving Sam, Kez and myself, shots were skilfully blocked until the full 15 minutes were up and both teams were at a draw: 3 to 3.

Second Round

Top Centre vs Lazy 88s: Lazy 88s put in a good fight but ultimately Top Centre sailed to victory, beating Lazy 88s 5 to 0
Polocalypse Now vs Polonators: A fast paced game, with a few close goals from Ian but finished 5 to 0 with Polocalypse Now the victors

Third round

Polonators vs Lazy 88s: Polonators pulled out all stops and scored goal after goal, with Lazy 88s answering with their own goals. The game was 4 all and the crowd was going crazy, everyone was cheering for Lazy 88s and yelling encouragement for Polonators until finally a small fumble from Polonators gave posession to Lazy 88s who quickly belted in the winning goal.

Single Elimination

Semi Finals

Lazy 88s vs Polocalypse Now: This was going to be the decider. With both teams playing to win and pulling out all of the killer moves, Lazy 88s smashed in two goals but Polocalypse Now saw and raised their two with five, winning the match and progressing to the Finals

Top Centre vs Polonators: Top Centre belted goal after goal against Polonators and won the match in under 8 minutes

Finals

Polocalypse Now vs Top Centre: Top Centre clearly had the better players, and with Damon sitting atop Scott’s new prototype “Symes” bike, the situation was looking bad for us. With Top Centre snatching a few early goals we were looking for any errors on their side that might give us a lucky break and finally it came and Vive was right on top of it and belted in a decisive goal, then Top Centre replied with more goals, then the moment came. Having posession in Top Centre’s half, facing away from their goals with one opponent on and another coming, I led them away from their goals and took a chance at a behind the back, blind, goal and in to the back of the net it went! BAM! One more for Polocalypse Now, cheers and minor celebrations were quickly hushed and Top Centre quickly made sure of their victory by quickly knocking two more goals.

Winning teams and rankings

1st place: Top Centre (6 points from RR: 3 Wins, 0 Losses)
2nd place: Polocalypse Now (3 points from RR: 1 win, 1 draw, 1 loss)
3rd place: Lazy 88s Sleep Squad (3 points from RR: 1 win, 1 draw, 1 loss)
4th place: Polonators (0 points from RR: 0 wins, 0 draws, 3 losses)

More photos from the tournament

Click here for a slideshow from RobM’s gallery
Click here for a slideshow from Damon’s gallery
Click here for David Cameron’s Facebook gallery

For some time now, we have been unable to gain access to the domain bikepolo.com.au, but as fortune sometimes smiles upon those who are patient, the domain came up for renewal and the original owner Alex Thompson, the grand daddy of this entire website, sent us an email asking if we would like to re-register it.

We quickly re-registered the domain and took the opportunity to migrate the domain over to our own domain hosting provider, and set up some Email forwarding as a test.

I would like to take this opportunity to explain why this is important and relevant to you.

With access to the domain, we can add our own hostnames such as “forums.bikepolo.com.au” or for example “sydney.bikepolo.com.au”. Do you see now how this could be useful? I thought so.

With access to the MX (Mail eXchanger) records, we can set up email addresses @bikepolo.com.au, for example info@bikepolo.com.au or perth@bikepolo.com.au to forward to your own personal email addresses, so for example perth@bikepolo.com.au might go to ash.awesome@gmail.com and sydney@bikepolo.com.au might go to lewis.veganmaster@hotmail.com etc. We are looking in to multiple forwards, for example sydney@bikepolo.com.au going to multiple personal email addresses

On the distant horizon is combining articles from the many sub-sites into one continuous feed of great polo articles for all of us to read.

I would like to thank Alex Thompson, Nik Dow and AJ for their parts in this significant but otherwise invisible change of ownership

Here is a form which you can use to add your own email address(es).

http://spreadsheets.google.com/viewform?hl=en&formkey=dDFlSGEyLWEwTzgzcDlhRkRKWlRQOUE6MQ#gid=0

Berlin rules, German style sausages on the BBQ, dark Beer and a whole
bunch of fun!

Saturday 7th August at the Fishmarkets Arena, bring a chair and enjoy our very own hidden secret
polo court

Registration will close on the 5th August so come on in and register here