Of Stadiums, Scandals & Other Things

ITEM: So the first of a number of hurdles has been jumped by Belle Vue in their pursuit of a new stadium. Agreement was given for the project to go ahead at a meeting of the local council, and while planning permission is still to be sought and granted, and the funding not quite in place, it would surely take a catastrophe the size of Belle Vue’s last few seasons to prevent it now.

If you were being charitable to me you could say I’ve been skeptical about the chances of it actually happening since the first announcement, and I still remain to be fully convinced that those behind the project are the right men to deliver it. However, I’m nothing if not fair, and getting this far is a good step towards making it a reality.

I still have concerns over the development of a National Speedway Stadium being left in the hands of the promoters of a single club rather than being held as facility for the whole sport by the ACU, SCB or BSPA as a unit, but if Morton, Gordon, and (most importantly) Carswell are the men backing it, we have to trust that they will be fair and proper custodians.

I’d still be cautious about the involvement of the new stadium in the SGP series or the SWC because, as it currently stands, BSI promote the British Grand Prix themselves, and may be unwilling to give up their golden calf or even allow a “competing” GP to take place in a far more fan-friendly location than its current home.

However, you can’t see this green light as anything other than a good thing at this stage, and I hope to be eating my hat at further opportunities along the way.

ITEM: There have been a couple of what you would “pre-emptive rain-offs” this week, and it’s a difficult decision to make based on the reliability of a weather forecast. If you get it right, congratulations on your foresight are few and far between, but if you get it wrong you can bet you’ll not hear the last of it for some time to come. And even if it seems you’ve gotten it right, there’s always some amateur meteorologist, usually miles away from the track, who was able to hang his washing out and so cannot understand couldn’t the meeting have gone ahead!

No promoter calls off a meeting without a very good reason. I’ll admit, once in a while, that the reason they give isn’t always 100% accurate, and that a rain-off is extremely suspicious (usually because they’re missing half the team, or because it delays a new average for a certain rider), but mostly they’re as disappointed as the rest of us.

Calling off a meeting costs hundreds, if not thousands, of pounds to the promoter. If he rents the track from a landlord, the rent still has to be paid, and it’s a date when money could have been made lost for the season. Late call-offs often mean riders’ flights have been purchased, programmes have been printed, and food for the concession stands ordered. These outlays aren’t always refundable.

The alternative to calling off a meeting when the forecast is bad is to run and hope for the best. Sometimes you get away with it, but you can bet that the crowd will be down on what it normally would have been in fine weather, because while people seem fine with a promoter risking thousands of pounds on a soggy meeting they won’t risk their own £20 in case it rains!

It’s a lose-lose situation for the promoter, and with the sport desperate for money and the economy being what it is, we should at least support them if they take such steps. Yes, it’s fun to laugh, and poke fun at Poole for raining off a meeting when two of their top four were out, or at Coventry for not entertaining King’s Lynn with a woefully out-of-form side, but we don’t have a small fortune resting on such decisions.

No, far better to keep your powder dry, and save your moans for the really disappointing decisions made by promoters these days. It’s not as if we’re short of those, is it?

ITEM: Someone famous died this week. You might have read about it. While I’m not going to go into my own feelings on that woman, although if you follow me on Twitter you probably have a fair idea, I will at least say she was a divisive figure. And that it seems to be the done thing to not speak ill of the dead, no mater what they did in life.

Weirdly enough, I was chatting with some friends last week about a someone connected with our sport who died in recent years, and the part he may have played in a scandal. The gist of the conversation was that, because he passed away, the truth was very unlikely to ever come out about the scandal because no-one would want to be seen speaking ill of the dead.

Those involved alongside him were probably very good friends and although the scandal broke because of a betrayal of friendship, I’d say that those ties will forever mean the real story will remain untold. Is that a good thing? It’s not for me to say, and although I’m usually all for openness and veracity I would err on the side of decorum on this one. The victim – if you can use that word, because he was certainly as guilty as the ones who got away with it – seems content to take the fall, and that should be that.

It’s an odd thing, the search for the truth. I would say, in the short time that I’ve been writing about speedway and – for want of a better word – gossip-mongering, that I’ve made a few errors. Not always in the information I’ve passed on and discovered, but in whether I should have done so. It’s a fine line to walk, and one which needs checking from time to time to ensure you’re on the right track. I hope I’ll continue to come down on the right side for as long as I do this.

ITEM: Things have one quiet again on the new track front, although Kent – at Sittingbourne’s Central Park – open their doors for the first time in just over 3 weeks’ time. Nothing new has been heard from Norwich, or Aldermarston, or Bristol or Cornwall, for the past few weeks, and it’s a case of sitting tight and hoping that no news is certainly good news.

One small ray of sunshine that has emerged in that sphere of interest is the participation of the Northside training track, outside Workington, in the Northern Junior League competition. Home matches will be run at the rapidly-developing facility on Saturday afternoons, a strangely untapped staging time for the sport, perhaps wary of competing with football and rugby league for the attention and finances of the sporting public.

The Northside facility, run by the Branney family, has staged rounds of the British Youth Championship in recent years, with few problems, and I’ve often wondered if it might not be the answer to the lack of third-tier opportunities for those from Scotland and the north of England. This, a dipping of the toe into the de facto fourth tier, could be a chance to find out just how viable it might be.