Fun to see this here. I had the good fortune of participating in the first match of motorcycle polo in Rwanda back in 2007. This continued on for a while and eventually got a writeup in the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/09/sports/motorized-polo-gai...
djsavvy 19 hours ago [-]
This is absolutely incredible!
arlobish 1 days ago [-]
"The official inventor of auto polo...devised the sport as a publicity stunt in 1911 to sell Model T cars."
Amazing to see how little has changed in 100 years when it comes to competing for attention
These days I have to check the upload date to see if I'm being duped. At 8 years ago this one passes!
fwipsy 22 hours ago [-]
Cool. How do they stop?
TomMasz 1 days ago [-]
Unsurprisingly, it died out "mostly due to the high cost of replacing vehicles". Was it the inspiration for demolition derbies?
merelysounds 1 days ago [-]
I guess the modern day equivalent (technology that’s relatively new, unsafe and unregulated) would be electric scooter polo? I found no sign of a sport like this though.
I think kick scooter polo exists. And bike polo[1] is well known.
My first thought was that Segways would be ideal for the nerdiest fun modern-ish recreation of polo. It turns out that it was a thing.
> The Segway polo world championship is the Woz Challenge Cup. It is named after Steve "Woz" Wozniak, cofounder of Apple Inc., and a player of Segway polo
WhirlyBall[1], which is kind of like pelota + basketball in bumper cars, seems like a pretty good bet. There are only a handful of courts left, but I've done a few offsites at the Seattle one, and it's good fun.
The bumper cars are truly weird - they draw power from the conductive floor of the court, and have a one-handed control system that makes you trigger forward/reverse by turning the steering wheel a full rotation...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/Auto_pol...
https://youtu.be/SIeu7_-iwdw
Amazing to see how little has changed in 100 years when it comes to competing for attention
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1avID4bJ3pw
I think kick scooter polo exists. And bike polo[1] is well known.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardcourt_Bike_Polo
> The Segway polo world championship is the Woz Challenge Cup. It is named after Steve "Woz" Wozniak, cofounder of Apple Inc., and a player of Segway polo
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Segway_polo
The bumper cars are truly weird - they draw power from the conductive floor of the court, and have a one-handed control system that makes you trigger forward/reverse by turning the steering wheel a full rotation...
[1]: https://www.whirlyball.com
Makes me want to dust off mine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motoball
>>Motoball is played in a 5v5 format. There are four players on motorcycles, and one on their feet as the goalkeeper.
We really should have an ocho channel for sports like this (of course /r/theocho exists, but it's not the same).
0: https://youtu.be/1UdoumWFWz8
Oh well, then...
To hear it was "popular"...