SCB, BSPA, FIM & more

ITEM: With the Speedway Star maintaining their customary (and baffling) silence on all things controversial, I didn't expect to read much more about the Belle Vue "wrong postponement" farrago until the SCB published their inevitably whitewashed decision. But a snippet in the Manchester Evening News on Friday revealed that the SCB would be taking no action - or at least that's what Belle Vue themselves claimed.

In any other sport, and with the weight of evidence and an admission of guilt going against Belle Vue, you'd expect a weighty sanction, if only to deter anyone else from doing the same. However, this is British speedway, and a whole different set of disciplinary standards seem to apply to clubs found guilty of serious wrongdoing.

This is, of course, a symptom of the clubs having all the power in British speedway, and there being so few of them means that any club that can stay in business season-on-season can expect pretty much a free ride. This has been obvious on more than occasion over the last decade, with clubs accused of offences deemed serious enough to bring before the SCB given flimsy punishments, if any at all.

What's all the more galling, particularly from a Coventry fan's perspective, is that this is exactly the sort of thing that an independent overseer would deal with - that being one of the conditions the Bees put on returning to the Elite League, and one which we were told would be installed in the fullness of time. It may be that, when the instigators for change left Coventry (and the sport) that it was swept under a carpet that has so much dirt under it that it must almost be touching the ceiling at Rugby House.

The news from Belle Vue was met with howls of derision but no real surprise, but I'm told that it might not be the end of things after all. Perhaps someone at the SCB has found a backbone and didn't like being gazumped by a club they'd allowed to escape sanction-free from the shonkiest of cons? There's a first time for everything.

ITEM: Someone else not happy with the powers-that-be that run British speedway is Scott Nicholls. He fired a massive broadside at the BSPA in this week's Speedway Star, accusing them of failing in their duty to support and encourage British riders.
Nicholls cited, particularly, a lack of fixtures at Elite League level and no support for riders like himself wishing to enter the European Championships. He also tried to lay the blame for the loss of the Cardiff Wild Card from the British Final winner at their door, although - as I wrote last week - this is purely a BSI decision and Nicholls's ire should be turned on them for that particular slight.

In some kind of petty tit-for-tat move, Nicholls has removed himself from consideration for the Speedway World Cup, damaging Team GB's chances of progressing from the qualifying round at King's Lynn in July. Who does this really punish? The fans, Neil Middleditch, and his fellow riders. The BSPA? On recent form, I doubt they even care.

There is a proactive way of responding to disappointment, of course. Nicholls, one of the sport's more sensible and mature riders, would be ideal to lead a reformed Speedway Riders' Association, perhaps involving David Howe, who has himself had plenty to say about the sport from a rider's perspective. With the top riders holding more power than they ever have, there is a real chance that they could get things done if they banded together.

I did suggest this to Nicholls but, predictably, the response was, "we tried this before and it didn't work". He might be right but it does work, however, in just about every other sport, so I fail to see why speedway should be so unusual given the right application. Besides, what's the alternative? Moaning in the press but not actually doing anything about it? That's been tried before, too, and look where we are...

ITEM: Showing that it's not just British speedway that can make a hash of things, the FIM threw their hat into the ring at the weekend with a ridiculous world under-21 championship semi-final at Rawicz, Poland.
The meeting, which saw young Brits Ashley Morris and Robert Branford trying to qualify for the three-round final, was run in apparently terrible conditions, and saw several competitors fall early on and take no further part in the meeting. This meant, as is customary, that their rides were taken by the meeting reserves, but this is where things got bizarre.

Rather than the usual track reserves, the Polish federation chose their two best non-qualifiers, and - on a home track however much affected by the weather - they racked up the wins and points against their non-Polish opponents. And, against all usual precedents, the meeting reserves were allowed to qualify, despite not taking a ride in the first four heats, and one of them taking two rides in one "set of four".

Fans at the track, and several of the riders involved, claim the meeting should never have been started, but that conditions were no worse after heat 16, when the proceedings were called to a halt, than they were before. Coincidentally, abandoning the meeting at that stage allowed all five Polish riders (the three "official" participants and the two reserves) to qualify.

Just why or how this was allowed to happen is unclear, but Lasse Bjerre and Timo Lahti, as the next two in line to qualify, can have every right to feel aggrieved. Further weakening the qualifying process is the anomaly that two of the semi-finals saw five qualifiers and the third only four - Kyle Howarth, who finished fifth in Lonigo, Italy, the one semi-final with a reduced qualifying quota, can also have every right to feel cheated out of a final place.

Armando Castagna was elevated to FIM Track Commissioner this year with a self-imposed brief to sort this kind of thing out. Let's hope he gets to work because at present it's a bit of a shambles.

ITEM: Is speedway entertainment or sport? Or a curious hybrid of the two? Its origins lie more in the former camp, a dazzling and thrilling new spectacle designed to draw in crowds and earn money from enterprising showground owners. Few other disciplines can claim such an origin, save perhaps boxing - for most sports the competition came first, and the fans (and professional athletes) much later.
As the sport developed, league speedway dominated the sport in this country, although there were still high profile non-league events held at each track - the Brandonapolis, Golden Hammer, and Blue Riband - as well as the prestigious Northern, Midland, and Southern Riders' Championships.

Lately, though, promoters will tell you - and they should know - that fans are interested only in league speedway, with crowds dropping alarmingly for non-competitive meetings, although I wonder how much of this is a result of the downgrading of such encounters over the years.

If I wanted to run speedway at my stadium in 2013 there are a number of hoops I would have to jump through, assuming I could get the usual permissions and licenses from the local authorities, a far cry from the sport's early years. Some of our best and most innovative promoters came from outside the sport with radical ideas that might not fit squarely into the three-tier league structure that pervades in the UK.

I wonder if there isn't room for something else, alongside and including what we have now, involving tracks who only want to run three, four or five meetings a season, as availability of facilities decrees. As it stands, unless you can fit into the very rigid system we have now, it's a non-starter. And I have to ask: does speedway exist purely to service the league or does the league exist to provide speedway matches?