East London Commonwealth Games: Bike Polo

Bike Polo was one of the main features at the East London Festival, and after enjoying the European Bike polo tournament last summer, we thought it was an opportunity to watch the amazing poloists again.  The location of the tournament was great as it was hosted in the Spitalfield market which meant combining most of my favorite activities: coffee drinking, bicycles, and wandering around spitalfields/brick lane.

The day started with a short 10 minute fixie ride to Brick Lane Coffee where we lazily sat on the comfy sofa soaking up the sunshine while  sipping  banana frappe. At around 1:30ish, we headed down to watch a few polo matches with a mission to find one of the forum guys who was willing to trade his BLB saddle for my specialized one. The mission seemed slightly impossible when one of the fixed gear forum girls described my boy as a youngish polo guy with a beard; she smiled with that smile full of knowledge "yeah, i know most of these polo guys  are bearded" My kind helper, passed my mission message to a friend of hers and slowly i created a descriptive image of the boy - and to my surprise i was able to find him and the successful trade of saddles brought my lo-pro project one step forward! success!

Back to the polo game, we saw La Schmoove, Malice, 14Co, and Zombie along with some hard shots that made the ball bounce and go off court and the ref having to run around the stalls to find it.

An unplanned highlight was our recruit into Carrom (a tabletop game) and the discovery of my unknown talent of flicking!see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carrom

The Carrom scores will remain secret but here are the
Bike Polo results:

Quarter Finals 

14 Co 3 - 1 Zombie
Malice 4 - 3 La Schmoove
Three Beards 5 - 4 ELKS
Cosmic 5 - 1 Rotten Apples
Semi Finals
Malice 3 - 1 14 Co 

Cosmic 4 - 1 Three Beards
Finals

Cosmic 3 - 2 Malice