Obscure-sports diary: You go, trampoliners!

Water Polo: Proudly television-unfriendly
Compared to other obscure sports, water polo is on television quite a bit — not in prime time, maybe, but it's doing a lot better than badminton in the PR department.

It's hard not to admire water polo for being so television-unfriendly and yet so enduring. It's a fairly simple game in the soccer-hockey mold, but even with different caps on the players to show what team they're on, it's almost impossible to follow on television. With all the splashing, the caps don't stand out much, making it a little like watching soccer, if it were slower and played in dense fog by two teams wearing dark blue.

Still, it's impressive for its relaxed pace, mostly because it's taking place largely underwater. If you learn nothing else from water polo, you will learn what a fast break in basketball would look like if, instead of the guys running at top speed down the floor, they all had to walk through an ankle-deep mud pit.

Track Cycling: If Phelps, competitors swam in separate pools
What I loved about track cycling is that the races make little to no sense.

Swimming is a logical sport: your task is to get from here to there faster than anyone. Diving: gracefully dive into the pool while doing tricks. Even something like a hammer throw has the internal logic of “throw this heavy thing as hard as you can.” Good deal; I get it.

Track cycling, however, has events that defy all laws of making sports interesting. You wouldn't hold a 100-meter dash where everybody ran in different directions, but in the “pursuit” track cycling events, you start the competitors on opposite sides of the track, and then they go in the same direction, so they're nowhere near each other. In theory, they're “pursuing” each other and one could theoretically catch up, but at least while I was watching, this didn't happen. Instead, it turned into a plain old race where two guys were cycling on opposite sides of the track, and they did some laps, and then it was over, and the faster guy won.

Just a hint — if you want me to be overtaken by the thrill of a sprint, I should be able to see more than one competitor at a time. If Michael Phelps and Milorad Cavic had been swimming in different pools, that race would have lost something.

There's also the “points race,” where points are awarded for a sprint that happens once every ten laps. The other nine laps are irrelevant. I mean, they're not irrelevant — there's strategy, and you're positioning yourself and so forth, but the race is 160 laps long, and only once out of every ten laps is anyone earning points. You can also get points for lapping the field, which is a bit like shooting the moon while playing hearts, as near as I can tell.

Apparently, track cycling was born out of a concern that simply riding bikes really fast wasn't exciting enough. Haven't these guys ever seen “Breaking Away”?

Linda Holmes lives in Washington, D.C. and is a frequent contributor to Msnbc.com

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