Croquet Sport

Looking back in history, croquet took place at the 1900 Summer Olympics, where three croquet events were contested, and at the 1904 Summer Olympics, known as roque, a variation of croquet. During the 1900 Summer Olympics seven men and three women took part. Initially, the doubles competition was scheduled, though it's unclear whether the French pair which won actually had any competition. The one-ball singles was played the next week, followed by two-ball singles the week after. France, with 9 of the 10 competitors, won all the medals. Belgium was the only other nation to send a croquet player, though he did not finish the first round of his competition. This was the only Olympiad where croquet was part of the official programm. One of the best known croquet clubs is the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club, originally the All England Croquet Club, which hosts the annual Wimbledon tennis championships.

There are a number of variations of croquet played nowadays, differing in the scoring systems, order of shots, and layout (particularly in social games where play must be adapted to smaller-than-standard playing courts). Two forms of the game, Association Croquet and Golf Croquet, have rules that are agreed internationally and are played in many countries around the world. More unusual variations of the game include Mondo Croquet, eXtreme Croquet, and Bicycle Croquet. Gateball, played mainly in the Far East, can also be regarded as a croquet variant.

Along with club-level games, there are regular world championships and international matches between croquet-playing countries. The sport has particularly strong followings in the UK, USA, New Zealand and Australia; every four years, these countries play the MacRobertson Shield tournament. Many other countries also play.

Croquet is universally considered to be viciously competitive. This may derive from the fact that (unlike golf) players will often attempt to move their opponents' balls to unfavourable positions. However, purely negative play is rarely a winning strategy: successful players (in all versions other than Golf Croquet) will use all four balls to set up a break for themselves, rather than simply making life as difficult as possible for their opponents. At championship standard Association Croquet, players can often make all 26 points (13 for each ball) in two turns.

Dissimilar to most sports, men and women contest and are ranked all together. Interestingly, three women have won the British Open Championship: Lily Gower in 1905, Dorothy Steel in 1925, 1933, 1935 and 1936, and Hope Rotherham in 1960. While male players are in the greater part at club level in England, the opposite is the case in Australia and New Zealand. At present (August 2008) the highest-ranked female player in the world is Jenny Clarke of New Zealand.

Croquet is characterized both, as a spare time activity and a competitive sport, which involves hitting wooden or plastic balls with a mallet through hoops embedded into the grass playing arena.

As said by Nicky Smith, there are two theories of the origin of Croquet before it took England by storm in the 1860s. The initial theory is that the game was French, and was introduced to England during the reign of Charles II, when it was played under the name of Pall Mall or Paille Maille, perhaps suggesting ball and mallet. This was the explanation given in the ninth edition of Encyclopaedia Britannica, dated 1877. Many writers have accepted this theory but there seems to be little evidence that the game either resembled croquet or influenced its rules; indeed, there is apparently a publication by one Dr Richard Prior dated 1872 that concludes that the two games are very different.

Another theory, which seems to have stronger credentials, is that croquet occured from Ireland during the 1850s, probably after being brought there from Brittany where an alike game was played on the beaches. John Jaques, of the manufacturer Jaques that still supplies a significant share of croquet equipment used today, apparently claimed in a letter to Arthur Lillie in 1873 that he had himself seen the game played there and "I made the implements and published directions (such as they were) before Mr Spratt [who is also claimed to have first written down the rules] introduced the subject to me". Whatever the truth of the matter, Jaques certainly played an important role in popularising the game, producing editions of the laws in 1857, 1860, and 1864.

The game became extremely well-liked as a public activity in England during the 1860s; by 1867, Jaques had printed 65,000 copies of his Laws and Regulations. It quickly spread to other Anglophile countries, such as Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the United States. It is very easy to presume, that one of the attractions was that the game could be played by both sexes; this also ensured a certain amount of adverse comment.

Nevertheless, by the late 1870s, croquet had been surpassed by another popular game - tennis, and most of the newly-created croquet clubs, including the All-England club at Wimbledon, transformed some or all of their lawns into tennis courts. Afterward, from that moment croquet was all the time a minority sport, with national individual membership amounting to hardly any thousand players.