This could be what comes after Rollerblades. Americans already have reaffirmed their passion for pedaling (about 70 million adults in the United States rode a bike in the last year, according to a 1991 Louis Harris poll commissioned by Bicycling magazine). And as Crested Butte goes in terms of cycling trends, so goes the nation. Mountain bikes outnumber cars in that town of 959, and there are more signs that say “Welcome Fat Tire Bikers” than in, say, the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. The town’s Fat Tire Bike Week (July 8-14 this year) saw the usual bicycle races, tours and rodeos. What seemed extraordinary, even to observers who’ve been around since the lean years of the threespeed English racer, was the excitement over the fifth annual bike polo tournament. In the finals, A Team Called Wanda beat the Pologoniacs 12-5, and established itself as the leader in a sport now played by about 100 teams in some 25 leagues, scattered mostly across the American West.
The real winner, though, was the game itself. “It’s a fascinating sport,” says Kelsie Miller, 65, of Aurora, Colo., who, with his wife, Phyllis, 65, spent $140 on a bike polo kit that includes four lightweight wooden mallets and two plastic balls that for safety’s sake are used instead of hard wooden ones. “You’re just hitting the ball as hard as you can, riding as fast as you can,” says Carl Kopf, 27, of Denver. “The first time you play, you’re hooked.” Actually, hooking or any other mean maneuver brings a penalty. “This is a very gentle-spirited game,” says Carla Meeske, 32, a marketing director at Kenner Products in Cincinnati. One better not complain about the ref’s calls, either. Gonzalez and Hufnagel wrote a “No Whining” clause into the rules. “We try to stop those John McEnroe attitudes,” says Wanda captain Ann Mirabassi, 28, a Denver geologist.
The sport aims, it seems, for perfect political correctness. Each team of four must have players from both sexes and, says Gonzalez, 37, a cabinetmaker by trade, “a 60-year-old guy and a 14-year-old kid should be able to play at the same time.” As he and his wife set about codifying the sport on their kitchen table in Bailey, Colo., a few years ago, they decided, she says, “that we wanted a noncontact, highscoring game that was just fun. " One thing they did was shrink the field to 60 by 30 yards, about one fifth the size used in conventional polo. Games are divided into two 10- or 20-minute “chukkers,” and there is a three-foot right of way on each side of the bike so that, as Hufnagel says, “people can’t be sticking mallets at you.” A free hit goes to the team whose player endures any contact. Goals are made at the rate of about one a minute.
So, it seems, are converts. “The very first time you go out you can hit the ball even though you don’t know all the rules yet,” says Kopf. “It doesn’t take too much coordination.” For some players, the “new” sport seems like old times, and with good reason: bike polo in various forms has been around since the 1890s and was a nonmedal “demonstration” sport in the 1908 Olympics. Never before, however, has it so perfectly embodied the Zeitgeist, a game untainted by sexism, ageism, racism and all that other horse manure.
