Underwater Hockey: The Game Played on the Pool Floor

Hockey is loud. Sticks clatter, skates scrape, crowds roar. Underwater hockey is almost completely silent, because it is played along the bottom of a swimming pool by people holding their breath. Two teams armed with short sticks push a weighted puck across the tiled floor toward goals at either end, surfacing only when their lungs demand it before plunging straight back down into the fray. The result is one of the strangest and most quietly gruelling team sports ever devised.

The game was conceived in mid-twentieth-century England, reportedly as a way for a diving club to keep its members fit and interested through the cold winter months when open water held little appeal. The original name, octopush, is still used affectionately today, even as the sport has spread to clubs across Europe, Australia, South Africa, North America and beyond. International tournaments now bring together national teams who take the pursuit entirely seriously, whatever amusement it provokes among the uninitiated.

A Three-Dimensional Game

What makes underwater hockey so peculiar is that it unfolds in three dimensions rather than two. Players cannot simply hold their position on the floor, because nobody can stay submerged indefinitely. Teams therefore work in constant rotation, with some members diving to contest the puck while others recover at the surface, ready to drop down the instant a teammate must rise for air. Possession ebbs and flows with the rhythm of everyone’s lungs, and a sudden lapse in breath-hold can hand the advantage to the opposition in seconds.

The breath-hold demands are the heart of the challenge. Top players develop the capacity to work hard while starved of oxygen, sprinting, jostling and manoeuvring the puck through brief windows before kicking back toward the light. It rewards not raw lung size but efficiency, calm and the discipline to surface a moment before desperation sets in. Panic is the enemy, and experienced players make the whole thing look unnervingly relaxed.

The Gear and the Grind

The equipment is modest but specific, designed to let players move and breathe efficiently while protecting them in the scramble.

• A diving mask, snorkel and fins, allowing quick breaths at the surface and powerful propulsion below.
• A short stick, only about the length of a hand, used to flick and pass the heavy puck.
• A protective glove and a numbered cap with ear guards to soften the inevitable contact.

Beneath the surface, the action is faster and more physical than spectators ever expect, a churn of fins and elbows fought out in near silence. Underwater hockey will probably never fill a stadium, partly because there is so little for an audience to actually see, yet it commands fierce devotion from those who play it. It belongs firmly in the gallery of pursuits that make a sport out of unlikely places, sitting comfortably beside the other oddities gathered in this magazine’s celebration of the love of strange sports.