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THE EQUESTRIAN SPORT OF HORSE HOCKEY
Spectators at professional horse hockey games heartily sing the national anthem at the outset of every game. And throughout the game, they sing various “fight” songs to encourage the home team.
If you live in a tropical country such as Brazil or Nigeria, you may not have heard of the sport of horse hockey. It’s a team sport played in northern countries such as Canada and Sweden. Horse hockey resembles the game of polo, except that it’s played on a large ice surface called a “hockey rink.” The players’ horses are fitted with “skates”—long sharp blades welded to the bottoms of the horses’ iron shoes. The horses are specially trained to skate rapidly and gracefully around the hockey rink.
Each team has six riders: three forwards, two defense riders, and one goalkeeper. Instead of a long-handled polo mallet, each rider carries a long wooden stick with a blade at the end, called a “hockey stick.” The object of the game is to bat a small rubber disk, called a “puck” into the other team’s net, scoring a goal.
In horse hockey, riders frequently jostle each other (called “body checking”), causing players to fall from their horses. Often, the fall kills the player outright because the ice surface is rock hard. A player who survives a fall frequently does not make it off the rink fast enough and falls victim to thousands of pounds of horseflesh skating over him or her.
The average professional horse hockey player earns several million dollars a year. But the average playing career doesn’t last more than a year or two, due to injury or death.
The rock group, The Doors, wrote and recorded a now-classic song about the equestrian sport of horse hockey, called “Riders On the Storm.”