Auto Polo
en.wikipedia.orgThis photo is incredible
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/67/Auto_pol...
Mad Max 1910
incredible indeed!
I’m sure many of us are reminded immediately of the old Top Gear auto football matches:
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...
This is absolutely incredible!
"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
Australian Motorcycle Chariot Race
These days I have to check the upload date to see if I'm being duped. At 8 years ago this one passes!
Cool. How do they stop?
Unsurprisingly, it died out "mostly due to the high cost of replacing vehicles". Was it the inspiration for demolition derbies?
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...
There is also unicycle hockey! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicycle_hockey
Makes me want to dust off mine
Nope. The modern version uses motorcycles.
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.
There's also e-wheel polo
I for one wish for mobile crane joust.
Bike Polo is still alive https://youtu.be/CBZgC7u6ji8 and for example https://youtu.be/PxMms5Yh_gI
I clicked the first link, expecting something akin to cycleball [0], and was rather surprised by the fact that it was so different from that.
We really should have an ocho channel for sports like this (of course /r/theocho exists, but it's not the same).
Rocket League is basically the video game version of this.
I would love to see it make a comeback. Definitely not the dullest of entertainment.
Vehicles ... dirt track ... large, wooden mallets ... no protective gear ... I see this as an absolute win!
Was? Not with this attitude!
Can someone add this as a new game mode in Rocket League?
> though deaths due to auto polo were rare.
Oh well, then...
What an incredibly bad idea!
To hear it was "popular"...