Athletics

Head to Sheffield on 4 and 5 August to take part in Sheftival, a sport, music and culture festival. There are have-a-go sessions in athletics and many more Olympic sports, including judo, hockey and football, plus more outlandish activities such as zorbing. All sports can be tried for free with your festival ticket.
• 0114-256 5567, sheftival.co.uk. Adults £12 day, £20 weekend, under-18s £10/£15, under-sixes free, family £40/£70

Badminton

Stay in a villa with a badminton court and make like Team GB's mixed doubles pair, Chris Adcock and Imogen Bankier. Holiday Rentals (holiday-rentals.co.uk) has some good options, including a villa in Alhaurin de la Torre, near Málaga, Spain, with a badminton court, ping pong table and playing field, or a converted farmhouse near Pisa, Italy, with a badminton/volleyball court. Or try Luxury Villas Lanzarote (luxuryvillaslanzarote.com) for a property with badminton court, pool table and table football, or Turkish Villa Rentals (alanya-holidays.com) for villas with sports facilities, including badminton, basketball and tennis.

Basketball

If you didn't bag basketball tickets in the Olympic ballot, put the money towards a trip to America to watch some streetball – an exciting freestyle version of the sport. The most famous courts are "The Cage", aka West 4th Street Courts in Greenwich Village, New York; Holcombe Rucker Park in Harlem, NY; and Venice Beach in Los Angeles. Talented streetballers are snapped up by NBA scouts, so you could be watching the stars of the future.
• New York leagues run most evenings and weekends until the end of July, with playoffs in August. The Venice Beach league is on Sundays at 1pm. All are free to watch

Beach volleyball

Volleyball England, the sport's governing body, runs a beach tour every summer where you can watch the country's best players and play the game on "come and try" courts, all for free. There are tournaments in Weston-super-Mare (23-24 June), Skegness (30 June-1 July) and Margate (7-8 July), with the final in Bournemouth (25-26 August). Twenty new beach volleyball courts have also been set up around the country, from Sherwood Forest in Nottingham to Perranporth in Cornwall.
• See volleyballengland.org. Find a court near you at gospike.net

BMX

The BMX centre at the National Cycling Centre in Manchester (nationalcyclingcentre.com) is one of the biggest in the world and the GB team's base. But as long as you register as a member of the centre, anyone can ride the track at a beginners' open session. The Birmingham BMX Track (birminghambmxclub.com) hosted the UCI BMX World Championships in May, and also runs open sessions for the public and coached sessions for beginners. Olympic athletes train at the Burnham-on-Sea track in Somerset (ultimatebmx.co.uk), but it is open to everyone on Tuesday and Thursday evenings. Rampworx in Liverpool (rampworx.com) is the UK's biggest indoor skatepark, and it runs some BMX-only sessions.
• Visit moredirt.co.uk for a list of BMX tracks in the UK and beyond

Diving

It's thrilling to watch Tom Daley dive from a 10-metre platform into a pool, but those of us who are less skilful might have more fun in the great outdoors. Try coasteering in Pembrokeshire with TYF Adventure (tyf.com, from £58 for half a day), which involves scrambling, climbing, swimming and cliff-jumping your way around the rocky coastline. Or head to Ponte Brolla in Switzerland next month to watch the World High Diving Federation's Cliff Diving European Championship (20-21 July, whdf.com). Or even to Mexico to watch the famous La Quebrada cliff divers plunge 35 metres (125ft) into the sea in Acapulco. Prefer to do it yourself? In southern Thailand, several companies on the island of Phi Phi Don (krabifamilyholiday.com) will take you by boat to a good spot and guide you to the top of a cliff. After that, it's over to you …

Shooting

Make a weekend of it at Ellenborough Park, a country house hotel in the Cotswolds (ellenboroughpark.com, doubles from £210 B&B), which can arrange clay pigeon sessions with a local shooting school for £49pp. Aikbank, a newly converted luxury farmhouse in the Lake District, offers a concierge service to arrange clay pigeon shooting and other activities (aikbank-lupton.com). West Kent Shooting School near Tunbridge Wells (wkss.demon.co.uk) runs one-hour lessons for novices. It's cheapest (around £40pp) if you can get three people together to learn, otherwise it's £75 for one or £95 for two, excluding clays and cartridges.

Swimming

At the first four modern Olympics, the swimming events were held in open water, not pools. Channel that adventurous spirit on an open-water swimming holiday. Swim Trek trips range from a two-day River Thames swim (the nice clean upper part, not the dirty bottom) to a week's island-hopping around Montenegro's riviera, plus "iconic swims" across the Dardanelles or out to Alcatraz.
• 01273 739713, swimtrek.com. From £180 for a two-day swimming and camping trip

Synchronised swimming

The Berkeley hotel in London is holding synchronised swimming masterclasses every Wednesday evening in July, open to the public as well as hotel guests. The classes are led by Aquabatix, a team of professional synchronised swimmers, in the hotel's rooftop pool with views of Hyde Park. Take some friends and learn a routine that will wow the dreary lane swimmers at your local pool.
• 020-7201 1699, the-berkeley.co.uk. £125pp for a 90-minute class with up to eight people

Table tennis

The Young Offenders Institute (theyoi.co.uk) hosts a round-the-table mass ping pong game on the second Thursday of every month at 93 Feet East on London's Brick Lane. The evening is dedicated to "the holy trinity of beer, music and ping pong". Dr Pong (drpong.net) is a basic but hip bar in Berlin with a ping pong table and not much else – the winner stays on and all challengers are welcome. New York has upped the ante with Spin (newyork.spingalactic.com), a bar/restaurant with a whopping 17 ping pong tables. There are sister venues in Milwaukee and Toronto.

Taekwondo

Learn the basics of taekwondo in South Korea, from whence it originated and where it is the national sport. The Namsangol Hanok Village taekwondo experience programme is run by the Seoul City government. Classes teach basic movements, self-defence and wood-smashing, and regular performances by expert practitioners demonstrate the art of traditional dance combined with martial arts.
• taekwonseoul.org. One-hour classes are held three times a day from Wednesday to Sunday until 3 November, excluding August, for about £10. Performances are on Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays and are free to watch

Track cycling

The centrepiece for London 2012's track cycling events, Lee Valley VeloPark (visitleevalley.org.uk), will be open to the public from the end of the 2013 and will run taster courses. The velodrome at the National Cycling Centre in Manchester (nationalcyclingcentre.com) runs one-hour sample sessions. Herne Hill Velodrome in South London (hernehillvelodrome.com) is good for beginners as its sides are less steeply banked, and it runs inductions and women-only training sessions. At Reading Velodrome (readingvelodromeracing.co.uk), beginners can hire bikes for £5 on Thursday evenings.

Trampolining

Trampolining is surely due for a trendy makeover a la table tennis, but for now, bars with trampolines are thin on the ground. Perhaps that's for the best. But if you want to emulate top trampolinists – without the benefit of their acrobatic ability and years of training – head to Brighton, Bournemouth or Weymouth. Jumpzone's bungy trampolines (jumpzone.org) on the seafront allow you to reach heights and perform tricks that would be impossible on a normal trampoline. With a harness, some poles and a few bungy cords, anyone can bounce like an Olympian.