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Water polo

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The Sydney Games ushered in a new era in water polo's history with women competing in the sport at Olympic level for the first time.

Australia's women marked the occasion in style, winning the gold medal in a heart-stopping final against their fierce rivals, the USA.

Water polo became the modern Olympic movement' first team sport when it was added to the program for the Paris Games in 1900, but parity for women' water polo players was a long time coming.

Water polo's reputation is anything but lady-like. It is considered to be one of the roughest and most brutal of sports.

While its devotees don't deny the sport is tough, they argue that the perception of water polo as a sport where brutality is the norm is incorrect.

Much of this reputation stems from a particularly vicious semi-final between Hungary and the USSR at the 1956 Melbourne Games.

The match came just weeks after Soviet tanks rumbled into Budapest to put down an uprising.

The Hungarian players saw the match against the USSR as a chance to fight back, literally.

Eventually, with Hungary leading 4-0, the match was abandoned and Hungary declared the winners.

Part of that perception of violence can also be traced back to the sport's roots in the United States.

Water polo is believed to have begun in the rivers and lakes of England in the mid-1800s as a watery version of rugby union.

Like rugby, this early version was liberally spiced with thuggery, particularly as the ball neared the goal.

The aim was to plant the ball on the end of the pool (or the river in the earliest days) with two hands, but to do so, the attacking player ran the risk of being bomb-dived by the opposition goalkeeper, who was allowed to stand on the edge.

Most matches degenerated into underwater brawls, with players ignoring the ball and instead pummelling the living daylights out of one another.

This continued until the late 1800s when rule changes gave the sport more of a soccer-like bias.

Goals were introduced and goals could be scored by throwing the ball into the net. An emphasis was placed on passing as players were only able to be challenged for the ball if they held it for an unreasonable period.

The popular tactic of ducking under the water with the ball to resurface elsewhere was also banned.

At this point, much of the brutality went out of the game. But on its introduction to the United States, water polo took another violent turn.

The game evolved into an aquatic version of American Football, and became known as the world's most violent sport.

Naturally it quickly became one of the nation's most popular spectator sports as well.

The Americans continued to play by their own rules until a national championships semi-final in 1912 which ended with what was, even by this sport's standards, an intolerably violent brawl.

The more civilised rules had been adopted by the rest of the world in 1911, and three years later the US fell into line.

European teams have dominated the sport at Olympic level, with Hungary particularly successful. Between 1932 and 1964 the Hungarians won five of the seven water polo gold medals.

More recently other European nations have taken the baton, with Yugoslavia and Italy both winning gold medals during the 1980s and early 1990s.

Spain came to the fore in Atlanta, but Hungary roared back to win gold in the men's competition in both Sydney and Athens.

In the women's competition, Australia wasn't able to back up and Italy took gold in Athens.