#RICO and other not so important things...

ITEM: I didn’t know Lee Richardson. Truth be told, he wasn’t one of my favourite riders. That’s no slight on him – I spent the greater part of his career away from speedway, and when I returned he was just another established heat leader. Still, I recognized his talent, and his commitment (even if that didn’t always include the ELRC!).

When he died in April I realized something big had happened. Riders have died before, of course, but seldom has their death produced the reaction Lee’s passing provoked. He rode for seventy percent of the Elite League tracks, as well as Reading, but the outpouring of grief came from all corners of the country, from those tracks he’d starred for, and the twenty-one he didn’t.

Fans were inspired to raise money for his family, with Chris Louis’s daughter, Freya, leading the production of the #RICO shirts you’ve seen up & down the country (and probably own yourself). I’m not sure if they need the money, but I’m sure his family are grateful for the sentiment – a constant reminder of the impact their husband, dad, and brother made in his short time on the planet.

Tomorrow night we gather in his memory. There’s a speedway meeting going on, but I’m not sure that’s the main attraction. Rico may have not been your favourite rider, or your best friend, but think of him on Friday at 8pm, yeah? I will be.

ITEM: Nigel Pearson and Kelvin Tatum come in for a lot of stick for their commentary on Sky Sports’s speedway coverage. Some of the criticism is justified, some of it wildly inaccurate, and spewed with a vitriol deserving of something far worse than bad commentary.

I’d say they make a good fist of what it is a pretty difficult job. Commentating on live sport is not easy, and requires concentration and innovation to avoid repeating the same thing over and over again, all the while trying to bring something fresh to action that the viewers can quite clearly see on their screens.

Where they do fail, I think, is in their unfailing hyperbole on one or two “superstars”. This is nothing unusual in sports commentary. Look at football – the commentator will latch onto a team’s star player, occasionally players, and tell the story of the match through them. That’s how sports commentary is done: how will so and so do? Can anyone match so and so? Is team X missing player Y? It’s a tried and trusted formula that works pretty well for most sports.

But not speedway. Speedway, as an individual sport masquerading as a team sport, should be a natural for this kind of play-by-play. Focussing on one or two riders from each side will pretty much cover every race in a meeting, writing the story of each heat, and therefore the match itself, simply and effectively. However, in its present state, speedway can ill-afford to adhere to the formula…

What British speedway needs is stars. If you were smart, you could make stars of varying quality and attractiveness out of all seven riders. Live television, on a mainstream sports channel like Sky, is perfect for that, but it is not happening. Instead, we get the same names, again and again, until a Poole match, for instance, becomes the Ward & Holder show. What happens, though, when Ward & Holder aren’t around?

Pearson and Tatum don’t owe speedway anything. There’s no impetus for them to change their ways, and I’d wager their bosses are quite happy for them to continue in the manner to which they’ve become accustomed. However, they seem to be big fans of speedway, just like the rest of us. They’re in a position to make a difference, however slight, to the direction and success of the sport in this country. I’d like to think they’d want to do that.

I’m not asking for a complete overhaul of the way they do their job. I’d like to see a little more focus on the other 11 or 12 riders in a meeting, and less on the “stars”. I want to know all about Kim Nilsson. I want to see kids pretending to be Jason Doyle. I want a casual viewer to know as much about Richard Lawson as they do about Tai Woffinden.

We can’t afford not to do this. The top riders may retire, they may get injured, they may give the Elite league a miss. We already have riders to replace them – it’d help us sell them if they shared in the hype.

ITEM: So Peterborough’s up for sale. Or it might not be. It’s not clear right now. What is clear is that the current owner, Richard Frost, is looking to downsize his investment, at least.

Running the Panthers at Elite League level, he claims, requires 2000 paying fans to break even, a ludicrous number that few, if any, tracks in the UK average over a season. Frost blames the large sums needed to keep the Panthers afloat on the lack of a top sponsor, but it’s as much an indication of the way he spends his money – often on expensive and unreliable foreign imports – as much as a bellweather for the rest of the Elite League.

Peterborough have never attracted large crowds. None of the city’s sports’ teams have, and the stop/start nature of a fixture list determined by the availability of the East of England Showground can’t help. However, they ran successfully in the lower division for many years in the 1970s and 1980s, cutting their cloth accordingly, you would argue. Have times changed so much?

If the club are put up for sale I can see few takers, at least at Elite league level. Whether it is financially viable to run in the Premier League is a subject for investors and accountants, but I’d like to think so. To lose a racing track like Peterborough would be criminal, so I’d hope something can be done.

As for Rick Frost, and his future in the sport? We lost a couple of wealthy speedway fans last winter when Avtar Sandhu and Allen Trump left the sport in disgust at the antics of the BSPA, and we can seldom afford to lose another. I’d hope he continues to back the sport in some way. Perhaps less spent on wastrels like Jepsen Jensen and Jonasson, though, eh?

ITEM: One of my favourite curiosities about speedway is the individual meetings that every track used to run, and that are still kept alive by a handful of (mostly PL) promotions.

From Cradley's Golden Hammer to Wimbledon’s famed Laurels, these meetings attracted the top riders who, back when the fixture list was more varied and guests were less common, made only one appearance per season at your local track.

For one reason or another, however, such meetings seen to have fallen out of favour. Birmingham haven’t staged the Second City Trophy for a few years, ditto with the Blue Riband at Poole, and both the Pride of the East and the 16-Lapper seem to have fallen off the fixture lists this season.

In recent years, however, Coventry have brought back the Brandonapolis, Dudley have resurrected the Golden Hammer, and Leicester have begun staging the Pride of the Midlands, so the trend isn't entirely one way.

A look at the line-ups of these meetings – and one-off testimonials staged at various tracks – reveals that there are a certain group of riders who are invited to compete time and time again (indeed, Steve Johnston used to joke about being Mr Testimonial!). These riders tend to be amiable, UK-based, and – above all – exciting and worth the entrance fee to see ride. And this set me thinking…

Next year marks the 85th anniversary of the first speedway meeting in this country, at High Beech in Essex. What better way to commemorate this than Grand Prix-style series, aggregating the results of these open meetings for a trophy? Especially if the riders invited were guaranteed to provide entertainment – no gaters, please!

Sure, some of the PL tracks with tighter margins may need a little assistance with their budgeting, but the value of including the Westernapolis or Scottish Open in such a series is worth the effort that the combined brains trust at the BSPA would have to make in securing a sponsor or sponsors for the series.

Maybe we could even name the winner’s trophy after Lee Richardson? A fitting tribute to a much-missed racer...