I was performing my patriotic duty the other weekend, watching the Olympics, when I witnessed one of the most violent sporting events I've ever seen at an Olympiad. You might be thinking that I was watching boxing, or one of the martial arts, but you would be wrong. I was watching women's water polo.
I have never watched water polo before, so when I saw that the US women were playing I thought I would sit down and watch the match. That is one of things I love most about the Olympics. It provides you with the opportunity to watch sports that you don't usually get to see. In fact, those are the events I am drawn too. Forget basketball, tennis, swimming and running - I want to see the javelin throw, the hammer toss, the discus, anything that is unique.
I have always been a fan of obscure sports. Just like in the movie Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story , I wish ESPN 8 The Ocho really existed. Back when I had expanded cable, I can remember surfing through the channels and hitting Australian Rugby or Football... I'm not even sure which it was. I ended up sitting and watching the rest of the game. I thought it was rugby at first but then the players were drop kicking the ball and doing some other weird things with the ball (nothing pornographic, I assure you) and I became mesmerized. I sat there, trying to figure out what the various rules were and how the game was played. This is exactly what happened to me with the water polo.
In the pool there were two teams of women flopping around in the water. When I say flopping, I mean no disrespect at all to these athletes. I grew up on a lake and spent most of my summers in the water. Treading water alone can be exhausting, but this is not the only thing the water poloers (water poloists?) are required to do. They have to swim up and down the pool, fend off their opponents and be able to keep their bodies high enough out of the water to be able to shoot or pass the ball. They have to be in peak physical condition. If I wore a hat, I would take it off for them.
As I watched I started picking up some of the rules. They set the ball in the middle and both teams swam to the ball like a dodge ball game. There was a shot clock, which makes sense because as soon as a team got ahead by a point they could just swim around and play keep away for the rest of the match. Much to my surprise, there were no horses involved.... hahahaha! That is a joke that never gets old. (How come whenever people refer to a joke as never getting old, the joke in question has grey hair, was wished a happy birthday by Willard Scott and is wearing discreet undergarments?)
The game seemed very straight forward: there was a team on offense, trying to throw a ball into their opponents' goal. The other team tried to prevent them from scoring and get possession of the ball so they could go on the attack. Each team consisted of six players and a goalie. In many ways it was like an aquatic soccer match. The thing I was having the most trouble figuring out was the fouls.
The referees seemed to be blowing their whistles every 5 seconds. Sometimes play would pause for a second, and sometimes players got sent to a "penalty box." Other times the team on offense got what can be best described as a socceresque penalty kick/throw. Some penalties were kept track of like in basketball, and if you got more than so many, you could not return to the game. They even had yellow cards, just like soccer. This was the limit of my understanding the game. I did not know what constituted a penalty and how severe each infraction was, and was once again too lazy to look it up on Wikipedia at the time.
All I know was that as I watched, it looked like a shark feeding frenzy was going on in the water. I thought someone had switched the channel to Discovery and it was Shark Week! The women appeared to be mauling each other in the water. It did not look like splashy, splash; it was more like drowny, drown. The women were thrashing around in the water, arms flailing and elbows flying. People were shoving and pushing and looked like they were trying to kill each other. Though the stuff out of the water looked bad, the underwater cameras revealed even more: The players were grabbing each others' suits, and doing anything they could to block their opponents, or to get around them. It was brutal!
There was one girl who had a black eye that she received in a previous match, and it was not from getting hit in the face with a ball. Someone ended up with a cut on her nose in this match. If I was more thorough I would do some research and see how many injuries that were received in the various matches, but just from the one match I saw, it has to be a pretty big number.
Am I surprised that a country's athletes would be willing to do whatever they have to in order to win? Absolutely not! Competition can be fierce, especially when a gold medal (and national pride) is on the line. The real surprise was that all this violence came from something as innocent sounding as water polo. And not to be sexist, but women's water polo. Water polo sounds like a "soft" sport and that is exactly what I was expecting - women tossing a ball around in a pool, doing splashy, slash. What I saw was hard core athletes playing hard and kicking ass!
I apologize for my misconceptions regarding the sport of water polo and send my congratulations to the US women for their gold medal. On watching the highlights of the Olympic matches, seeing the ability of these aquatic athletes and the ferocity of their matches, I feel I can add water polo to my list of Olympic sports I will not be trying out for in 2016.
And on a sad side note, as I was looking for images of water poloists, you would be surprised to see how many wardrobe malfunction clips there were. (Well, maybe not that surprised.)
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