Rugby and skating not Poles apart
Players and fans alike know that Rugby Union and ice hockey are contact sports, and skating allows you to show off your elegant moves. But what if you combined them?
The apparently madcap theory has been turned into reality by Pole Adam Golab, who has rolled his sporting passions into one.
“I’ve been skating for 23 years. It’s the kind of passion that you can’t just leave behind,” Golab told the Krakow Post, and English-language newspaper published in the southern Polish city of Krakow.
But Golab also loves Rugby Union.
He used to play for Krakow’s Juvenia, a member of Poland’s eight-club top flight.
“The combination came together when four years ago we came up with the idea for a freestyle skating club,” he told the Krakow Post.
Messing around on the ice, Golab brought along a rugby ball and started teaching fellow-skaters the basics.
“That was when it came to us that rugby on ice skates could be a truly amazing sport,” he said.
Now he and a group of fellow enthusiasts from his 100-member skating club are working on a set of rules.
Lacking padding, they so far only play a touch version. But Golab said the plan is to develop a full-contact equivalent.
“I want to show people that there is such a thing, and show the speed of the sport, the dynamic action, and that it’s possible to create a kind of action that can’t be organised on a grass pitch,” Golab told the newspaper.
“Rugby on grass can never be as fast as rugby on ice.
“We can get going as fast as 50 kilometres [30 miles] an hour. Even hockey players don’t go as fast as we do with the ball, because they have to handle the puck with a stick. We play so fast you can’t even keep track of the ball,” he said.
AFP
