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Meet the real axles of evil
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Uncommercialised,
unhomogenised and as rock'n'roll as a speed-addled rat up a gold lame
trouser leg - welcome to the world of urban bike polo.
By Steven Wells
The Guardian, May 30, 2007
At 7pm on the dot, the mean, lean and eager athletes arrive at the bike
polo pitch. They warm up, strip off their pristine outer-kit and
stretch tanned, muscular limbs that look like tawny pythons. They stink
of deodorant and clean living and they look like gods. Then they trot
off to the pitch next door and play soccer.
About half an hour later - half an hour after the advertised start time
- the bike polo players wheel into view like the cavalry vanguard of
some vast crusty army. Exuding 'tude and reeking of tobacco, most of
them come straight from their jobs as bike couriers. Their cut-offs and
caps are grimy with exhaust fumes. They have the same symbiotic
relationship to their battered but beautifully maintained bikes that
Genghis Khan's Mongol horde had with their ponies. And they are just as
fearsome. No one's in charge. No one's in a rush. They chatter, bum
snouts, drink cheap ale, dance the hoochy coo and pull crude homemade
mallets from their gaffa-tape patched shoulder bags. "A ski pole jammed
through PVC piping is what the kids are using these days," Mark
'O'Polo' Capriotti tells Philadelphia Weekly reporter Kate Leshko.
"My mallet's made out of an old hockey stick," says 31-year-old
courier/musician Chris George who plays in a different game "under the
El in No Libs" (whatever than means). The rules vary from hood to hood,
but urban bike polo is very much like the equestrian version, explains
Leshko. "Except your bike won't stop to take a piss and you don't have
to shoot it when a spoke breaks."
The game starts. On their customised single-speed beater bikes and
using skills honed during their daily life-and-death-struggle with
motorists, players go from hell-for-leather to stock-still at the drop
of a gnat's bollock. The skill level is startling. Usually played
three- or four-a-side, some games penalise players whose feet touch the
ground with time in a sin-bin or an enforced beer chug. Goals generally
have to be scored with the tip of the mallet and deliberate barging is
considered "assholeish". While refs are not unknown, urban bike polo -
like park and playground football - is more usually disciplined by a
primitive communist "mob consensus".
Bike polo's been around over 100 years. There's an internationally
organised mainstream version that's sober and suburban, helmet-wearing
and played on grass - as embodied by the thoroughly respectable if
somewhat geeky US Bicycle Polo Association. "All that is needed to play
is a bike, an approved cycling helmet, a bike polo mallet, and a bike
polo ball," chortles their website, Baden Powellishly.
But those guys are considered effete wimps by the asphalt bikers. "We
have nothing to do with them," says Chris George. "The guys in Philly
are more into a roots hard-core, get drunk, smash into each other and
come home bloody sorta thing." Urban bike polo - also known as bike
hockey - is to proper bike polo what punk is to polka. It feature teams
like New York's Ratkillers and Portland's Axles of Evil ("bike polo for
the insane"), who take part in tournaments like Vancouver's Last Riders
of the APOLOclypse.
In short, urban bike polo - like its riot-grrl sister roller derby - is
an autonomous, anarchic, DIY punk sport as yet untainted by
professionalism. It's a mosh-pit on wheels, enjoying pretty much the
same position in the hipster hierarchy as skateboarding did before
commercialisation and sponsorship turned it into a sold-out 10 cent
whore.
"Basically they're a buncha 'we haven't got any rules' crusty punks and
greasy-banged urban hipsters," says New York-based British cultural
critic Tom Cowell. "Stoked on Pabst Blue Ribbon beer rather than Pimms,
they're re-inventing and thereby subverting an elitist cultural form
with what can only be described as Brechtian zeal. In short these
tattooed two-wheeled miscreants are the direct descendants of the
plantation slaves who mocked white pomposity with a dance called the
cakewalk, and the British Teddy boys who took upper class clothes and
turned them into something infinitely edgier, sexier, more aggressive
and exciting."
Like agriculture and Satanism, bike polo seems to have been repeatedly
re-invented. There's a game played (with huge wooden mallets and what
looks like a football - the Yanks use a tiny plastic wiffle ball) every
Wednesday in Hurlingham Park, Putney that seems to have developed
entirely independently of the American hipsters. There's even a British
team called The Axles of Evil. Uncommercialised, unhomogenised and as
rock'n'roll as a speed-addled rat up a gold lame trouser leg, it's
surely only a matter of time before Nike or Coke or Sony discover urban
bike polo ... and wreck it beyond all recognition.
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