4ucycling

What is bike polo? Bike polo is a team sport. A team consists of three players on bikes who try to hit the ball into the opposing team’s goal using a mallet. They are not allowed to touch the floor with their feet – if this happens they cannot intervene in the game until they have hit the designated area with their mallet. The game ends either after ten minutes or when a team has scored five goals. Janku: “A few minutes changed my life” “One-handed cycling was completely new to me”, explains Jirka Janku, a Czech bike polo player from Prague, when looking back at his first (bicycle) test rides. “Holding a mallet at the same time seemed impossible. However, after a brief familiarisation period, I found it much easier and the game became more fun by the minute.” Today, Janku is a multiple tournament champion and even reached fifth place at the world championships in New Zealand in February 2016. “A few minutes at the beginning of my bike polo career changed my life dramatically. I bec...

Over the past year along with B’Twin and Decathlon UK, we’ve been encouraging people to get themselves and others riding with our getbritainriding campaign. It’s been a huge success too: over 10,000 cyclists have pledged to get friends or family on bikes saying that they’d help a whopping 42,000 people take up riding this year. In total, you lot have pledged to ride a hard-to-comprehend 23 million miles over the course of the year. Sit yourselves down, you must be worn out! British Cycling, coincidentally, have been doing something similar this year and they’ve just published the first results from their ‘Bike Shed’ studies, a collaboration with behavioural scientists at Colombia University and their partners HSBC looking at “how best to encourage, motivate and dispel the fears associated with getting on a bike.” Given, they say, that 50% of UK adults are ‘lapsed’ cyclists, they developed a series of studies to identify new and tangible ways to inspire people to get out pedalling. ...