#23 Attend 3 National Sporting Events of Sports You've Never Seen Before

Oh poor bucket list blog, how you've been neglected lately. I've been busy with lots of things, but the bucket list is still a priority in my life! In fact, I've got three items completed, but un-blogged... with some big plans for completing some of the larger items next year. So there'll be some more lovin' here soon!

My friend Liz's suggestion for the bucket list was to attend sporting events I'd never seen before. An interesting idea! Unfortunately, she shot me down when I suggested going to Lingerie Football...

Dancesports 

AIS Arena filled with dancers

The first event we agreed upon to go to was the National Capital Dancesports Championships. We both thought it fit very well with the theme of going to odd sporting events... even if we happened to be stretching the definition of sport a little bit.

The National Capital Dancesports Championships is an annual event held in Canberra at the Australian Institute of Sport. It's a three day event, but we only bought tickets for the last day - we wanted to see those who made it to the finals!

Oh, how we were not prepared for the sheer number of glittery dresses! As soon as we walked into the arena, over the top outfits were abundant. Seems female dancing attire is just not appropriate unless it's brightly coloured and very glittery.



Dancing's meant to be fun people!

Already we were feeling like this was a different, strange world. Women in far too much makeup led their men around like trained puppies and nobody seemed to be having fun - all around it was serious faces or fake smiles.

We made our way to our seats. I'd been under the impression that this would be a busy event, as there didn't seem to be too many seats left when I booked the tickets. The reason for this became quickly apparent - the majority of the seats around the arena had been reserved for performers and their family/support crew. We took our seats with the 14 other people who had actually purchased tickets and started to watch the show.

... And got bored.

Well, maybe that's a bit harsh. I think for the first few minutes we made some sarcastic comments such as how long the men must have trained to pull off their smiles; but before long we were pretty bored.

Here's how it goes.

First they announce the category and pairs of dancers pour onto the dancefloor. The pre-determined music starts to play and everyone starts to dance around in a circle following the moves they'd been practising for weeks. In some cases, the moves were determined by the organisers, but regardless it always seemed very static to us. After a few minutes, they play another song, then the dancers leave and another category is announced.



You have to see some dresses in motion to

fully appreciate the dazzling spectacle



I think it would have been much more fun if they'd actually had a band, but I guess they had to play the same music that everyone had been practising to. Which well, kind of defeats the purpose of dancing in my opinion. The fun of dancing is in expressing how you feel about the music. The music drives you to move in certain ways, so you move in that way. Liz being a band member and I being a (former) dancer understand that the dancers feed off the band and in turn the band feeds off the dancers to create an enjoyable energy.


Gives you a bit of an idea what the afternoon was like.
This is the latin section, the most entertaining part of the day.

 

The dresses in the latin category were far skimpier... but just as glittery

There was no enjoyable energy. It was just people moving through the motions. Too many game faces (heavily sprinkled, of course, with fake smiles), too little engagement of each other, too little FEELING. Maybe technically they were moving in skilled ways, I don't know. The dancers' disengagement resulted in our disengagement.

Things got a little more interesting when the latin category started. The dancing was more playful, the outfits more outrageous (for both the men and women, but of course particularly for the women) and the music was more enjoyable. It wasn't enough though. We'd been there three hours by that stage, which was plenty enough for us, so we went home.

 

 

Squash

Yes, this was our view of the action

A few months later we booked ourselves into another interesting looking event in Canberra - The Australian Open Squash Championships. This is another annual event in Canberra, this time taking place at the Convention Centre. The championships is big enough to encourage top ranked players from overseas to come and compete in it, so it is sad that our cricket and football dominated Australian society has no idea of the existence of this event.

But we thought we'd check it out!

We bought tickets for the men's quarter finals, which was held on a Friday night. We were pleased to see our tickets got us front row seats! Though, frankly, there wasn't really a bad seat in the house.

The Convention Centre turned into a squash arena

The setup was very clever - they'd set up a squash court in the centre of the room, which had one-way glass. So the crowd could see through whichever side of the court they needed to look through, but the back of the court appeared solid. In similar fashion, to the players it seemed as if all sides of the court were not transparent. The players could hear the crowd (but not see them) and the crowd could hear the players (and see them).



Clever cost cutting measures meant that the organisers'
kids did all the cleaning up between matches

It all made for an excellent viewing experience. The action was close and exciting. As per the requirements of this bucket list item, I'd never seen top level squash before, but it was very entertaining indeed. I enjoyed the tactics involved in trying to get the ball past your opponent and certainly admired the players' ability to track and anticipate the ball's trajectory as it bounced off the walls. At that distance too, the personalities of the players really came through... When one player started to voice his frustrations at some not-so-good decisions by the umpire, the crowd could feel his agony.

We were treated to four matches for the evening. A couple were easy straight sets victories, but a couple of the matches were very tight as well. The most popular players were the Aussie (of course), and Ramy Ashour, ranked 5th in the world and the defending champion. Ramy, in fact, went on to win the tournament two days later, and has since become the #1 player in the world.

Both Liz and I thoroughly enjoyed the Australian Open. We both commented that we would go again. Unfortunately the reason we had great seats and easy viewing was because there was not many people there... and sadly Canberra managed to kill off another interesting event on its calendar via lack of interest... because sadly I can't find any media that suggests the Australian Open will be back in 2013, so I think it has been cancelled.

Not even the positive media that a good planking can drum up could save it!

Water Skiing

Driving to work one day I noticed an interesting sign advertising "NZ vs Australia - The Bledisloe Cup of Water Skiing". I had to contact Liz. Luckily, we were both available and so agreed that water skiing would be the third sporting event we hadn't seen before.

The event was actually the Australia vs New Zealand Water Ski Championships. It has been running for a number of years as a way to develop young water skiers in Oz and NZ and 2013 was the first year it was to be held in Canberra. Indeed, the first time any international water skiing event was to be held in Canberra.

Beautiful day... Nice relaxed setting... Lovely

We met up at Liz's house on a sunny Sunday morning and rode over to Pialligo to where the event was being held on the Molonglo river. It goes without saying that it was a very nice ride and a lovely setting for a sporting event. This was a little corner of the river that nobody really knows about and as we rode up we already started to get the feeling like this was a little escape from the city (not that Canberra's the kind of city you feel you need to escape from!).



Waterskiing backwards using only one leg

We rode up behind some small sets of bleachers that had been set up to watch the river. Pockets of people sat around them enjoying a bite to eat and awaiting the next competitor. It all had a nice feeling of being like some sort of large family picnic rather than an international sporting event.

We pulled up a spot on a nice looking bleacher in time to catch the next skier. It was the slalom, in which the boat went at a constant speed through the middle of the river, while the skier had to ski between marked buoys. Luckily, there was an announcer to explain all this to us and the other viewers in a very friendly manner or we would have had no idea what was going on.

The slalom wasn't that interesting, but we'd timed it almost perfectly for the end of that segment of the day. The next event was the "tricks". This was more fun to watch. The boat moved slowly past the shore, while the skier had a 50m window to pull as many tricks as they could. Yes, there was some jumps and stuff, but most of the tricks were things like going backwards or using your foot instead of your hand to hold on. Some of the kids were absolutely amazing! ... Some of the kids fell in.



Jumper Take-Off

After the tricks was the jumping event. There'd been a big ramp sitting there all day and we were pumped to see it get some use. Interestingly, the jumping event is not about doing tricks, but rather simply a distance event - with the boat going at a constant speed for all jumpers, who could launch themselves off the ramp the furthest? ... And stay upright for the landing.



Jumper Landing

This was definitely interesting to behold. The first dozen times. After that it started to get a little monotonous, so, exhausted after a long day in the sun, Liz and I decided to go home. This was a much different feeling to going home after the Dancesports - there we felt fed up and bored. For the water skiing, we felt like we'd seen the exciting stuff, had enjoyed our day and didn't need to stay longer. Besides, as the announcer had told us, the Australians had a commanding lead - so there wasn't much tension. We certainly felt satisfied by our day though... and all for free!





Couldn't leave without an action planking shot - can you spot the skier?


Going to new sporting events was such a great idea. Thanks Liz. It was really interesting to check out new worlds and new sub-cultures. We even agreed after the water skiing that we should continue checking out unique sporting events, even though the bucket list item is technically completed now.