Urban Golf

So you don’t want to walk the golf green and get all that healthy exercise, or there isn’t one anywhere near where you live. There is another alternative, known as Urban golf. This is where the players attack an innocent warehouse wall with their golf ball. Just make sure you aren’t in line with the ball when it bounces back!

Bike Polo

When you haven’t got any horses, the only way to play polo is on bikes. This fast growing sport is rapidly developing an international competitive calendar.

Unicycle

Once only seen in circuses, or on stage, the unicycle has become a worldwide phenomenon. From acrobats and balancing acts, to mountain racing, to unicycle hockey, the one wheeler has become an overnight sensation.

First introduced in Finland, wife carrying is a sport where male competitors race while carrying a female team mate. The objective is for the male to carry the female, whose job is to help keep the balance, through a special obstacle course in the fastest time. The carrying holds differ from piggyback, fireman’s carry, to Estonian style, where the female hangs on upside-down, with her legs around her partner’s shoulders, as she clings on to his waist.

Major competitions are held in Sonkajarvi, Finland, Monona, Wisconsin and in Marquette, Michigan. In Finland, the prize is the female’s weight in beer.

Wife Carrying Contest

Growing a beard and moustache is a serious business, as seen at the biennial World Beard And Moustache Championships, where men display their carefully manicured extraordinary beards and moustaches. Categories include Dali moustache, goatee and full beard freestyle.

Of course you must have all the right tools, from moustache wax, to moustache nets, brushes, combs and scissors.

Moustache Competition

Rollery Derby

Roller Derby players pride themselves on their fusion of punk grit and attitude, plus genuine athletic talent. The women’s Flat-Track Derby Association held its roller derby’s first national championship tournament in 2007.

Zorbing

While many see this as a purely recreational sport, there is a growing following to Zorbing . Each competitor ‘walks’ down a set trail, inside a car-sized globe of plastic, reaching speeds of up to 50 kms per hour. Not a sport for the faint hearted and there are medical restrictions.

Cardboard Duelling

We have all heard of the knights of old dueling in their coats of armour. The modern knight is very serious about his Cardboard Tube Duelling, where the clang of steel swords is replaced with the dull thudboard of ‘cardboard swords’. Dressed in cardboard box amour, the competitors duel with cardboard tubes.

The ancient sport of Snow Polo was once popular among Turkish emperors. It is played on compacted snow on flat ground, or a frozen lake.
However, polo has not been limited exclusively to horseback. There are now canoe polo, camel polo, elephant polo, golfcart polo, BMX polo, yak polo, and underwater polo.

Ice Polo

Mini Helicopter

No longer will do you have to only dream about flying like James Bond. The day is fast approaching when you will be able to do it yourself, right from your own backyard.

Martin Aircraft, a New Zealand-based firm, has just released information about a strap-on mini helicopter, that travels at 62 mph for about 31 miles. There is also a smaller version that travels at only 6 mph in a controlled outdoor area, such as a football field. With very few instructions you too could be airborne.

Inventor Glenn Martin said, “To be able to fly solo in a fixed-wing aircraft can take 15 hours of flight training, but most people are able to learn to fly the jetpack in a few minutes.”

This new sport could begin to compete with bunjee jumping, or skydiving.  The only catch is you will have to travel to New Zealand for the experience. The company hopes to be able to expand to Australia and the United States in the near future. Orders started pouring in to the company, after the mini helicopter was shown at a trade show in Wisconsin.

Each Martin Jetpack costs around $150,000, the price of a high end sports car.

If the jetpack is not your speed, there is always the rocket belt, designed by Stuart Ross, a commercial pilot. It can shoot the wearer 1000 feet into the air at 60mph.

In preparation for his upcoming unattached test flights, Ross sought advice from the Civil Aviation Authority, who referred him to a psychiatrist from their medical department. The content of the visit was never revealed.

The rocket belt has cost Stuart around $200,000.

As an alternative for the more daring, you can climb into a light aircraft and cruise to a few thousand feet, strap on a jet-powered set of wings and open the door and fall out.

The wearer can then cruise at around 190 mph and is able to dive, soar and perform figure eights. You can even perform a spectacular roll. All this in the matter of just a few minutes.

Portable Jet Powered Wings

“It’s like being on a motorbike. But I have to focus on relaxing, because if I show any tension, I start to swing around,” says extreme sports enthusiast and former fighter pilot, Yves Rossy, who flies commercial planes for Swiss airlines.

It took five years of training before Rossy would display his wings in public.

Rossy is making plans to cross the English Channel later in the year, knowing this will test man and machine to the limit. He also has plans to fly the Grand Canyon on his jet powered wings.

The cost of the wings is too high to ever become a commercial proposition. To date Rossy and his sponsors have poured over close to $300,000 into the project.

Better training programs, medical and financial support and permitted drugs have improved the results in all sports. Lighter, cooler, more efficient movement enhancing clothing and footwear have aided sports-people to run, jump, glide, throw, lift, ride, climb, stretch, drive, paddle, cycle, higher, faster and stronger than ever before.

“Sports technology research includes aerodynamics and materials in engineering, through to physiology and human performance in biosciences, to improved accuracy and mobility in GPS in applied science,” said Professor Mainwaring, Dean of Research and Innovation, for RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia. All areas of world-class sport require the assistance of trained experts who research, assess, advise, train and evaluate all levels of the sport, including recovery from and injury prevention.

Governments, universities, sporting academies, manufacturers of sport items, institutes and research units, pour thousands of dollars into being seen to produce and back the world’s top athletes.

However, with the ban of the full-body swim suits to be implemented on the 1st January, 2010, what other science, technology and engineering advances are going to have to be removed from the sporting arena? Specialized diet and exercise regimes, medical check-ups, to watching your competitor perform on video, could all come under the heading of technology and scientific aids which benefit the athlete.

Athletes are complaining that the latest rashof record breaking results have been achieved through scientific enhancements. They say to compare results from 2010 with results from the 1930’s is like comparing a space ship with a 1930 ford car. Even the sporting rules have changed over the period of time.

94% of swimming gold medals in Beijing were won by competitors wearing the LZR Speedo suit. However, the body-suits are causing a different kind of phenomena. Some people believe the suits are making a mockery of the sport, in more ways than one.

When U.S. swimmer Ricky Berens bent over to do his stretches, before taking his place at the 4X100m starting block, his tight body-suit split, revealing his bare buttocks to the watching world. He was allowed to continue the race even though he felt the split had gone to his knees.

The same thing happened to the Italian Olympic swimmer Flavia Zoccari a month before at the Mediterranean Games in Pescara, Italy, when her full-body swimsuit split in exactly the same place. Zocarri was extremely upset as she was forced to withdraw from the race.

The International Swimming Federation called a ban to the body-suits, as it was believed they gave an unfair advantage to the wearers and were in fact technological aids.

However, the FINA caved into legal threats and later lifted the ban, allowing the suits to be worn at the World Swimming Championships in Rome. The Italian national swimming team protested to the ban, while the manufacturers said the basis for the ban was scientifically flawed.

The 100% neoprene, or polyurethane aerodynamic body-suits are believed to have been responsible for some unbelievable performances. Some say the suits improved stability and buoyancy and reduced drag to a minimum.

Despite never having made an Olympic final, the French swimmer Frederick Bousquet shaved 0.34sec off the world record in the men’s 50 metres freestyle in April. In June Germany’s Britta Steffen broke the 100m freestyle world record. Both swimmers wore full body-suits.

Michael Phelps chose to stay with last year’s Speedo LZR Racer, which is less than half polyurethane. His manager threatened to pull Phelps out of all future competition if the issue was not settled.  It was reported the manager was upset by the new suit, that a fellow-competitor Biedermann was wearing.

Phelps had spent two years helping his coach Bob Bowman develop the Speedo LZR Racer suit, used at the Beijing Olympics. Phelp stood to gain a $1 million bonus from Speedo if he won seven golds, a record held by American Mark Spitz. Phelps left Athens in 2004 with six golds and eight medals overall. He won 8 gold medals in the Beijing Olympics and would have collected his million dollar bonus.

Performance director of the British Gas-sponsored GB team, said: “It should be the athlete who has the most talent and who has worked the hardest that should win the race, not the athlete who is wearing the most technologically advanced suit.”

The FINA are under pressure to return the sport to the more basic low-tech values, by banning the suits from January 1st 2010. However, it is unsure whether America will comply with the ban.

All swimming records created to 2010 will however remain standing, even though around 70% of records were broken by swimmers wearing a full body-suit at the Beijing Olympics. The problem is that swimmers in world championship events and the Olympics, beyond the start of the ban of the body suits, will be competing against records set with a major technological edge.

The questions remain – how much bare skin will be revealed by top swimmers in the coming meets and where do you draw the line in technological advancements? From helmets, to skiis, running shoes, yachts, bows and arrows, tennis rackets and strings, rowing boats etc., all depend heavily on such advancements.