By David Hutton
You don’t have to be a king to play polo. In fact, you don’t even need a horse.
On an asphalt court in Ev Tremblay Park in Little Italy, just off Champagne Street, a devoted group of bike messengers, bike-shop employees and assorted cycling enthusiasts are playing bike polo, an increasingly popular sport with a hugely successful local base.
The game dates back to the 1800s, but it is being transformed from its upper-crust roots to an aggressive street-hockey hybrid as it mixes with Ottawa’s bike-obsessed messenger culture.
“It’s like street hockey but on a bike,” says Alexis Mills, a local messenger and one of the first players to try the game in Ottawa. “It really doesn’t resemble horse polo at all . . . it’s just that we swing mallets.”
Players ride fixed-gear bikes, the kind messengers use to maneuver through traffic. They set up orange cones in lieu of goal posts and knock around street-hockey balls. There’s no goalie and the first team to score five times wins.
The most important rule is that the players’ feet cannot touch the ground. If a player’s foot touches down, they must ride to the sideline and touch an orange traffic cone before returning.
They usually play three times a week, and will continue to until the asphalt court is turned into a hockey rink come winter. On this cool November afternoon, a dozen players come out for a pickup game. A dozen spectators stop to watch at a park picnic table after grabbing lunch at a nearby deli.
Players are broken up into teams of three by tossing their mallets into the middle. Because wooden mallets often break when hit against concrete, players make their own, attaching a handle from an old ski pole or golf club to a piece of industrial-strength piping. A golf bag full of multi-coloured mallets is sprawled on the ground beside the court.
Mills, Angelo Sarrazin, and Allen Grier picked the sport up at a bike messenger competition in Portland five years ago and brought it back to Ottawa.
“We just got hooked after we played and decided we had to get it going here,” Mills says. “Word of mouth took over from there.”
Since then, about 30 players have joined them, including about 15 regulars.
“They kept on bugging me when they got back and eventually got me to come out,” says Jennifer Books, a local messenger who has been playing for four years and is one of only a few female players. “I got obsessed and immediately started working on a bike for polo.”
Books has since been through four polo bikes. She says she’s drawn to the game because she’s able to use the skills she’s gained as a messenger in a different way. Conversely, many of the bike-control skills she’s learned at polo, where you often have to change direction very quickly, she is able to apply in her day job.
“It’s a habit now,” she says. “I feel a compulsion to come out here every week.”
In September, Ottawa hosted the North Side Bike Polo Invite, one of the largest hard court bike polo tournaments ever put on with teams from across the United States and Canada. A team from New York, a growing market for the sport, won. The team of Mills, Sarrazin, and Grier, known as “The A Team,” won the two previous North American championships.
Ottawa’s brand of bike polo is more of a finesse game than other cities, Books says. In New York, for instance, contact is more common.
But there are still a lot of injuries. Grier, for instance, broke his hand last year after it was smashed by a mallet.
Only two players on this afternoon are wearing a helmet and none of the players are wearing any protective gear.
“There’s a lot of road rash,” says A.K. Walls, who took up the game three years ago after being asked by Sarrazin to come out.
In front of Walls, on the court, Mills cuts off a player’s path as he plows toward the goal, making the player stop abruptly and sending two other players off their bikes. Another player whacks the ball through the wheels of Mills’ bike to score, as everyone else lies on the pavement.
Walls just smiles.
“It’s a rough and tough game.”