Welcome back! Hope
you all enjoyed your holiday season, however you choose to celebrate it. With
it being a slow news period, I asked for requests for topics to be discussed,
so this week is a readers' special!
ITEM: League racing dominates speedway in the UK, and in most of the major speedway nations in
Europe. Elsewhere in the world - in Argentina, New
Zealand, and South Africa, for instance - it's
individual competition that rules the roost. That's especially true in Australia,
which is ironic given their riders' predilection for league racing in this
country. For all the talented stars they've produced over the years, the
Australian scene has never established a system of league racing - and Jamie
Wood wanted to know why...
League competition
dominates spectator sports in Europe, and especially in the UK. The roots
lie in sport's professionalism in the late 19th century, when the simplest way
to ensure that players you paid to play for you didn't turn out for someone
else - and have enough guaranteed fixtures to ensure it is worthwhile to
contract the players in the first instance - was to form a league. Members of
that league would adhere to rules forbidding the poaching and moonlighting of
players, and agree to a certain number of fixtures, the results of which would
decide a champion. It sounds simple enough to us now but when William McGregor
proposed it for football in 1888, more than one Victorian gent fell off his
penny farthing. The Football League (never the English Football League,
because it was the first) wasn't the earliest organised sporting competition
along those lines - some baseball had had leagues prior to that - but it was
the first big league, and gave birth to everything that followed, good
and bad.
Where football
went, team sport fell into line. Rugby League gained its name from the
league that was formed when the Northern Rugby Football Union broke away from
its southern, amateur counterparts in 1895. Six years earlier, cricket
inaugurated its County
Championship, although
amateurs and professionals played alongside one another until the
1960s. English Rugby Union organised into league competitions as late as
1987, heralding the collapse of "shamateurism", an illusion of
non-professionalism which fooled no-one, which eventually happened in
1995.
Early speedway was
promoted as a spectacle, and its overseers still retain the title of
"promoter", unique in a team sport and more often found in boxing or
wrestling. They would stage competitions as a boxing promoter staged
"cards", with the best riders of the day brought in to draw the
crowds. Pretty quickly, and with speedway tracks opening the length and breadth
of Great Britain, promoters sought to protect their best assets - no sense in
promoting a star rider for your card if he could appear the next day ten miles
down the road - and the formation of the English Dirt-Track League in 1929,
quickly followed by the Southern League the same year, ensued that wouldn't
happen - at least not without non de plumes and tracks "running
black". Being part of a league also means that every fixture should be
"not to be missed", with every ride counting towards glory at the end
of the season.
And that's pretty
much the story of British speedway, league competitions all the way, save for
the odd blockbuster open meeting here and there, and - of course - the League
Riders' Championships, often seen as more competitive than world finals.
Internationally, speedway remains predominantly an individual sport, which
perhaps explains why it isn't more a source of pain that our world champions
have been few and far between - we are so focussed on league competition that
our failings on an individual level just don't amount to a hill of beans. At
least, it's a comforting thought to cling to!
In Australia, however,
league racing never took off. There are a number of reasons that might explain
this, chief amongst them that their premier talent - exactly the ones you might
expect to keep hold of by forming a professional league - jumped on a ship to
the mother country, where there were richer pickings to be found. It also
doesn't help that Australia
is a huge country, and its major settlements few and far between. The top
league of one of its national games - Australian Rules Football - was
predominantly a Victoria
State league until the
recent past, and without the backing of major sponsors and television
contracts, it's unlikely that national leagues would have taken off in any
sport down under.
With the decline in
interest in our sport worldwide (and, yes, even Polish crowds are down on
Communist times, even if today's sponsorship and revenue would have been
beyond the wildest dreams of Zenon Plech and his compatriots), a simple
answer to "why isn't there league speedway in Australia?" is,
"if it were possible, it would have happened before now." Although
distance is something of an issue, at least inter-state, there are
enough meetings promoted in most states that a league campaign could be
viable. In New South Wales, Kurri
Kurri staged over a dozen meetings in the 2012/13 season, with Nepean and Gosford also
promoting speedway in that state. Down in Victoria, Mildura and Undera Park
stage full seasons, with Broadford chipping in to make a decent amount of
meetings in that state. The real issue, then, must be of an
unwillingness on the part of promoters to stage league meetings, and an
assumption - correct or not - that the fans will not turn out for such events.
It should also be noted that, unlike the UK
and Europe, speedway in Australia
(and New Zealand)
is rarely bikes only, with the rest of the card often filled by sidecars
(especially) and also sprint cars and other four-wheeled machines.
Australian tracks active in the last 5 years
So that’s it, then
- no league in Australia
so they all come over here, cap in hand. A decent speedway rider in the UK
can expect to be paid for a good 50 meetings season, if not more, and with the
slim pickings available at home its not hard to see why young Australians pack
up and make their way half-way across the world to our leagues to make a
living. There's a myth that this makes them hungrier and more deserving of a
chance than our local, lazy youngsters, but it's just that, a fallacy. It's a
simple equation - if you want to make a living at riding a bike, you have to
leave Australia.
They should be given no extra chances because of their "sacrifice"
and we should only accept the best. Perhaps then, if there were half-decent
riders still knocking about down under, they might make something of their
scene after all...
ITEM: Monster Energy staged their second Monster
Invitational meeting over the holiday period – an event deemed so important
that Darcy Ward would miss his national championship for it (although still
gratefully claim the support of Motorcycling Australia in his Grand Prix
endeavours, no doubt), and won by Britain’s own Scott Nicholls, a non-GP,
non-Monster-sponsored rider, which must have pleased the sponsors no end.
The field was
seeded with GP stars and international quality riders, as well as the pick of
the home talent, and with the US proving that they can stage a meeting of this
quality year-on-year, Matt Davis wondered if it augurs well for a US GP before
too long…
The simple answer
is “yes”. There are three things you need to stage a grand prix in the modern
era – a local promoter willing to pony up the cash to series leeches BSI, good
sponsorship to help recoup some of that cash, and a track to stage it on. On
the first two counts, California looks a great bet to stage the next
non-European GP, with former rider Kelly Inman, race director at Industry
speedway, doing a sterling organisational job on the Invitational events, and
Monster Energy willing to back him with walking cash, but it’s the lack of a
European-size track in a stadium-style venue that will hold them back.
Previous FIM events
in the US have been held at
the Veterans Memorial Stadium in Long
Beach and at the LA Coliseum, but it’s been over 25
years since either were used for our sport. Existing tracks in the US tend to
be on the small and “homely” side, unlikely to impress the corporate suits BSI
would be eager to attract to a showpiece event on the west coast (although they
still go to Vojens, so what do I know?). According to SGP mouthpiece Philip
Rising, efforts have been made to find a stadium large enough to accommodate a
European-style track and satisfy the
needs of the organisers, but have so far come up empty, with all suitable
venues pricing themselves out of the market if they were interested at all.
This is where
Monster Energy – and BSI – could really put their money where their mouths are.
Kevin Costner was told by a ghost that “if you build it, they will come,” and
if the combined bank balances and enthusiasm for speedway that those two giant
corporations appear to have can just think outside the box for a moment, they
might find that building a purpose-built venue might just have the long-term
benefits that such an investment requires.
To make stadiums
pay in the modern era they have to be multi-use, and that would be especially
true in a nation where speedway is – for now, at least – a sideshow. But it
isn’t beyond even the most rudimentary architect to develop a speedway stadium
that is easily converted to stage other events, which would bring in the
revenue required. It’s a brave step, and would require a hefty initial outlay,
but surely not too much more than the total rental costs for four or five GPs
in a large stadium in that area?
So, given all that,
the answer isn’t an immediate “yes”, but I don’t think it will be too long
before one obstacle or another is overcome and the US
sits somewhere between New
Zealand and the first of a billion Polish
GPs on the GP calendar. Just who that will be good for is another question
entirely…
ITEM: Regular readers will know that if there’s one team I have
absolutely no time for it’s Poole Pirates and their scheming owner, Matt Ford.
But Nick Wellstead challenged me to reveal my secret hidden love for the
Pirates and so here, in no particular order, are the 10 Things I Love About
Poole Speedway:
1. The chippy at
the top of Wimborne Road
2. That one of
their fans was literally a tramp
3. Erm…
4. Struggling now…
5. Ooh, I used to
quite like Lars Gunnestad!
6. …
7. No, that’s it
8.
9.
10.
ITEM: There was one other request, from Seamus O’Robson, who asked, “if
you were a promoter, how would you attract new customers, what entertainment
would you add to a meet and still make a profit?”
Now if there’s one
thing I’ve learned over the past couple of years writing this blog, and talking
to promoters who read it, it’s that this promoting game is a lot harder than it
looks. Like anyone who attends speedway, I have my own ideas about what they’re
doing right and what they’re doing wrong, and that has filled countless blogs
over the months.
There is still more that promoters could do,
and things they should stop doing, and probably – somewhere between them all –
is a near-perfect set-up. And that’s the first step I’d make in speedway
promoting – get together and share ideas, adopting what works and getting rid
of what doesn’t. There’s a good example of everything somewhere in this country
– it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realise how effective Porky at Wolves
and Dudley is at energising a crowd and
keeping them involved between the races, for example – but somehow bad practice
still pervades, in some areas, at every track.
So, yeah, cop-out
answer, but get together and share ideas!
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