The folks at Mashable Daily have a fun explainer on cycleball—a wild combination of cycling and soccer, which requires some of the coolest bike handling skills you’re ever likely to see. The players ride on specially-designed fixie bikes (no brakes) and are divided into two teams, just like football.
It’s certainly not a new sport, as the image below shows; it used to be known as Bicycle Polo. We like the German version of the sport’s name, which some English-speaking fans of the sport also use nowadays: Radball. Rad is German for bike, but we think that the English interpretation is also extremely fitting.
Cycleball was first played in 1893, and the first world championships were held in 1929. The sport is big in a number of countries, including Belgium, Austria, France, Japan, Russia, and Switzerland. Germany is known as the walhalla for indoor cycling, which includes Radball and Artistic Cycling.
Radball is closely related to Artistic Cycling, which perhaps requires even more finely-honed bike handling skills. Judge for yourselves: