Humphrey Appleby

Look at the bigger picture though. The 11 World Finals have come at the cost of taking 11 (22 if you include Fridays) of the most lucrative race nights away from league racing. All very well if the SGP could provide full-time employment to the participating riders, or alternatively put money back into lower levels of the sport (as international cricket does), but it does neither. It uses assets of those developed and employed by others for a cut price fee (not to mention public money in some cases) for the benefit of a private corporation. Enjoy it while you can, because once professional speedway as we know it is strangled, IMG/BSI will move onto the next sport willing to do its bidding.

I'm not sure how an occasional 2 or 3 column inches in the national press justifies speedway not getting a cut of any profits. Moreover, many sports with virtually no national coverage whatsoever get better attendances than speedway. National media coverage is even less critical in these days when fewer and fewer people read papers, and television viewing is diluted over umpteen channels.

Unfortunately, I think economic realities will set in with the Olympic Stadium and it'll be sold off as a football ground or dramatically reduced in capacity if it stays as an athletics stadium. Large athletics stadiums are simply unsustainable as evidenced by the crumbling Olympic stadiums around the world.

There's a couple of points to be made here. Firstly, I think there's a reasonable argument that the World Final was run into the ground by the FIM to justify the introduction of a GP system which could be sold. It's reasonable to say that crowds had declined, but neither were they that bad at 'proper' venues either. Certainly the crowds at the likes of Munich, Gothenburg and Wroclaw were as good or better as at modern GPs, and even those at Vojens and Bradford were better than at most GPs now. Secondly, satellite and cable television was still in its infancy in the late-1980s and there was much less scope than now for getting speedway on television. Even live football was a relative rarity, but by the time the SGP came to fruition, channels were proliferating and were desperate for content. The FA Cup is a knockout competition and is shown on television, so there's no reason to believe television wouldn't show the old-style World Championship if was presented in the right way.

I'm not sure that speedway is ridden in any more countries than it was years ago, and the main professional circuits are still in the four or five countries they always were. As to whether speedway is more widely watched (geographically) on television, well that's a bit debatable even if BSI do claim it's being shown in Dijbouti or wherever. What certainly changed was that more countries wanted to stage a 'World Final', and in the case of Denmark and Germany they perhaps had a reasonable case at the time. However, taking the showpiece event to backwater stadiums in small countries hastened the decline of the World Final, and frankly shouldn't have been allowed. UEFA wouldn't stage the Champions League Final in Latvia or Slovenia (with all due respect to those countries) because they don't have the facilities or fanbases, yet the FIM were apparently happy to allow the World Final to go to Norden, Pocking and Amsterdam. Even then, despite the supposed decline of the World Final, as many people watched the latter events in Poland and Sweden as go to the GPs there now, and a British World Final would probably have got as many as Cardiff if there had been a decent-sized stadium available at the time. Even Bradford got 25,000 which is an attendance most contemporary GPs would be very happy with. The GP was and is simply about making the competition saleable to television and sponsors, which would be fine if this money actually benefitted the sport rather than enriching a private corporation. I'll fully admit that I lost interest in the World Championship after the SGP was introduced (even pre-BSI), simply because part of the attraction was following the riders from your team through the various qualifying rounds, hopefully eventually to the Final. I never really had a lot of interest in individual racing though, so once that link was broken, my interest waned. Nevertheless, I certainly don't think we should live in the past, and I can see certain advantages to having a GP series. I do think the current format suffers from overkill and a lack of variety, but that's nothing that can't be fixed. However, what absolutely does need to change is for the national leagues to cut themselves in on the deal. You can't blame BSI for exploiting a commercial opportunity, but it's ridiculous that the golden goose was allowed to be sold off by the FIM. Furthermore, not everyone bought into the BSI hype (reserving judgement on the current IMG incarnation). Their success was packaging up the existing events and selling them to television (albeit for a relatively moderate sum) as well as pulling in a few sponsors, but their promotional capabilities didn't seem anything special and fiascos like Gothenburg were just down to poor organisation (regardless of who was supposed to do what). Unfortunately, SGP devotees only seem to see things in black-and-white. Unless you unequivocally praise the SGP then somehow you're 'anti-SGP' even if you might support the basic concept albeit not the way things are currently implemented.

What's wrong with being anti-SGP, especially if you can make a reasonable argument that it's not all it's been cracked up to be? And whether or not the start time has changed, a drop in viewers is a drop in viewers.

It seems to be a reasonable analysis of the situation, and adds some weight to the supposition that everything is not rosy in the SGP garden. The irony of course is that this year's SGP has been the best for a while, but I suspect the goose has been cooked.

I used to love reading old programmes to see the names of the second half races - "Reserves (sic) Romp", "Junior Jaunt" and the like. However, the 'Hawkins of Harrow Snowball' always seemed pretty daft to me.. A ketch is a sort of sailing boat isn't it, although what is has to do with speedway is anyone's guess.

That a good point. Given that the news leaking out was suggesting a Feb/Mar timeframe for an antipodean GP, there wouldn't seem much time to get things arranged before the FIM meeting in October when dates get agreed. Reading between the lines of the press announcement, it doesn't much sound like it'll happen in 2011. The other problem with running GPs before the European season starts is that riders will be going into them cold without much in the way of competitive racing beforehand. Has David Tapp finally given up on rugby league? He's been involved with speedway for years though, and promoted the ISMS a few years back. If an Aussie GP was financially viable, he'd surely have been the person to have done it by now.

Yes it is ridiculous, but championship points don't have to be awarded in this manner. There are all kinds of ways of ensuring the winning rider gets the most points (and 2nd placed the second highest numbers), whilst still making the points scored during the 20 heats meaningful.

I was specifically referring to events on the night, for which it's more important to have a meaningful finale to keep people watching. Yes, in any Grand Prix system the result can be decided before the last round, but that's undoubtedly what the Superprix was about, and why NASCAR has a contrived finish. However, if you market each GP as a specific event as they do in F1 for example, then the overall championship can still be incidental to the popularity of the event. Tennis is only a knockout sport because it developed that way; probably because tournaments were originally the preserve of amateurs with limited time (professionals tended to play exhibition matches in the early days). However, there are some tennis tournaments with round robin play, and the various tournaments do contribute to overall standings akin to a GP system. In the early days of speedway, individual racing was a match racing contest and the four rider formula was undoubtedly introduced to make things more exciting. Nevertheless, some of the riders of the time apparently considered the 20-heat format to be mickey mouse and nothing but a lottery, which shows there's nothing new under the sun...

By participants, spectators/viewers, or by revenue? In terms of revenue and spectators, it would probably be football, baseball, basketball, American football and Formula 1. Horse racing, tennis and golf would probably have the next highest revenues, but I suspect cricket, ice hockey, rugby union and cycling are actually watched by more people globally (especially if you discount horse racing as a true spectator sport). However, baseball, basketball, American football, ice hockey and cycling would be considered minority sports in the UK. With respect to participants, it depends what you describe as a sport because I expect angling and various martial arts are well up there. However, football, basketball, baseball and cricket are probably the biggest participatory sports, although field hockey shouldn't be discounted as it's popular in the Indian Sub-Continent which has 1.4 billion people, whilst volleyball, table tennis and badminton undoubtedly have a significant numbers of adherents as well. Yes, but there are still other sporting associations with more member countries than the ITF. It's also a fair bet that football will be played at some level in those countries that are not FIFA members (e.g. Greenland which actually has a 'national' football team), wheresa it's less certain that tennis will be played there because of the court and equipment requirements. I'm certainly not disputing that tennis is widely played, but it's impossible to claim that's played in more countries than any other sport, even if we could agree on what constitutes a country in the first place.

I don't see what's illogical about it, and it's based on the playoff system used in Rugby League amongst other competitions. The idea of the SGP series is to make for good television, nothing more, nothing less. Whether that's right can be debated, but there's absolutely no way the promoter of any competition made for television will allow the result to be decided before the last event. What can be made 'fairer' though, is giving some advantage to those competitors who perform better leading up to the finale, which is not really the case now. I might not particularly agree with the implementation, but I don't see what's illogical about giving better performing riders the opportunity to score more points. It's no different to winning tennis players getting more matches to score more points during tournaments, or golf players getting two extra rounds if they make the cut. You obviously wouldn't award race points in the same way as now. You'd have to award a fixed number of points based on finishing order, but that to me would be better than the current system whereby the winning rider can score less points than a lower placed rider.

I think that's the point. It's guaranteed that the last race will decide the winner, but it also reduces the number of dead races during the first 20 heats as most riders will still have a chance of qualifying for the Semi-Finals. I don't see it as being a particular issue if you look upon the 20 heats as 'qualification' for the knockout part of the competition, but I would re-jig the knockout heats to give more advantage to those riders finishing higher. For example... Heat 21: 1st to 4th placed riders Heat 22: 5th to 8th placed riders (last 2 eliminated) Heat 23: 3rd & 4th in Heat 21, 1st & 2nd in Heat 22 (last 2 eliminated) Heat 24: 1st & 2nd in Heat 21, 1st & 2nd in Heat 23 So the 5th to 8th placed riders only have a single chance to reach the Final and have to negotiate an extra heat, whilst the 1st to 4th placed riders get two chances to reach the Final.

I was referring to tennis as a spectator/televised sport, not by the numbers that participate. There are many sports that attract a lot of participants, but are barely seen on television or covered by the media. I'm also well aware tennis is a popular spectator sport in many parts of the world, but again I was referring to its specific status in the UK. I'd wager the vast majority of those who watch Wimbledon, barely pay any attention to the sport for the rest of the year as evidenced by the relegation of many tournaments to daytime cable schedules. Granted there's more interest at the moment because of Murray, but I don't think it's unreasonable to say tennis is effectively a minority sport in Britain for much of the year. As to the assertion that more countries in the world play tennis than any other sport, well that's one of those unquantifiable things. FIFA has more member countries than the ITF, and not to mention that football is likely to have more participants due it to being simpler and requiring less equipment to play (incidentally, the IAAF has more member countries again, so by that definition athletics is more widely 'played' than both football and tennis).

The problem is that Polish tracks are reportedly paying significant amounts of money for the privilege of staging the GPs, when they could be staging them for next to nothing if they managed the rights themselves. No doubt the staging cities believe it's worthwhile to do this, but that money could also be going back to the leagues if they ran the show. Poland is the only country where stadiums come close to selling out, so you can't blame BSI for staging umpteen GPs there, but it's unbelievable that the leagues with all the professional riders continue to allow this state of affairs to continue...

It is somewhat in the UK, except around Wimbledon. Regardless though, speedway simply vanished from the schedules on Saturday and we had the odd situation where the former England cricket captain ended-up having to explain where it had gone.

Riders can't make a living from SGP, and I suspect that's unlikely to change in the future even if IMG/BSI eke out a few more rounds. However, they'll continue to juggle the SGP and league racing whilst they're allowed to do, and it's up to the league promoters to find/force a more optimal arrangement (for them). This won't happen by the British leagues taking unilateral action though, as even if they ignored the GPs, domestic attendances on Saturday nights would be affected if they're up against a GP on television. However, whilst you can't blame IMG/BSI for looking for business opportunities, it's an absolute nonsense that a third party is allowed to own and operate the premier event in the sport without sanction from, or compensation payable to the promoters who provide the riders with a living. However, until the British, Swedish and Polish stop trying to compete with each other and insist on a better deal, then the sport will muddle on indefinitely. I suspect the SGP doesn't make as much money as people imagine, but it would be better if that were going directly back to the sport rather than to an Anglo-American corporation...

I finally gave up on watching the SGP last year, such was the dullness of the competition in the preceding couple of years. However, I have caught a couple of GPs this season and I'll admit they seem a lot more entertaining. I would have watched the last one as well, but with the overrunning of the cricket, it was moved to the red button which doesn't work on Virgin Media. That I think sums up the relative standing of the sport, and despite the supposedly good viewing figures (as some posters on here recently suggested these have been exaggerated), it's clearly little more than a filler sport for Sky. Regardless of the entertainment though, what does the SGP actually mean for bread-and-butter speedway? Does it bring more fans through the turnstiles or otherwise bring more money to local tracks through sponsorship or other means. Do the benefits of having the SGP on pseudo prime-time television justify the loss of 11 prime weekends during the season? I suspect the SGP has prevented a more rapid decline in interest in the sport than would otherwise have happened, and has probably tapped into the latent market of 'people who used to go to speedway'. It may even have attracted some new fans, but the ever declining attendances at British tracks would suggest this doesn't really translate into direct benefits at the national level.

The SGP would be finished without television, although whether the sport needs the SGP is of course the great debate...

Does anyone actually know how much money Cardiff makes (or doesn't) and how this compares to former Wembley Finals...?

It simply comes down to a promoter willing to pay IMG/BSI for privilege of staging a GP, pay the travel expenses, and assume the risk of the potential losses. Presumably if it were financially worthwhile IMG/BSI would have promoted it themselves before now... What would be point of staging GPs in non-speedway countries where it's never likely to become established, just so IMG/BSI can earn a bit more money? The reason that F1 and MotoGP races are staged in these places is simply because the local emirs pay a fortune for the prestige, not because the locals are particularly interested in the sport (as evidenced by the crowds). Speedway though, just isn't in the same league as these sports prestige wise.

The problem is that large athletics stadiums are white elephants, so the stadium either needs to be drastically reduced in size, or converted for use by a more popular sport. Either way, I can't see how speedway would fit into the plans... This said, the site of the stadium is close enough to Central London to make it interesting enough for fans, and I'm sure the Olympic Park will have its attractions as well, just as Munich did for the 1989 World Final. Whilst Cardiff is a decent enough venue, I can't see why people get religious about the place.

Before 1985, I think all teams did start in quarter-finals, but even though the Intercontinental/Continental division tempered the worst mismatches, the competitive imbalances were probably the main reason why the format was changed. That was also in the days before the breakup of the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia which are now represented by multiple teams. Russia (and the Soviet Union before it) has always been one of the better 'minor' speedway countries, and reached a number of World Finals in the past. It would be better to look at the results of smaller countries which have put out teams in the past. Staging a tournament with eight teams means twice the amount of expenses, and at least one and possibly two meetings wouldn't feature the home team. What might work is staging the quarter-finals as a double header, but again there's still twice the expenses. The World Cup admittedly doesn't include the best 32 teams, but nearly all finalists these days are able to make a match of things. The competition has the money to fund proper preparation, and of course most of the players in the finals will be full-time professionals. Moreover, even a football team ranked 60th in the world is still amongst the top third (as there's 202+ teams). By comparison, a speedway team ranked 16th is about two-thirds of the way down, but most countries ranked below about 20th only have a handful of riders and couldn't hope to enter even a half-competitive side at the lowest level. I think there were never more than 20 countries represented in the World Pairs, even though speedway is probably ridden in about 26 countries. [bTW - I underestimated Luxembourg who are currently ranked 116 by FIFA. The equivalent of the highest ranked nation riding against 16th in speedway (assuming 26 speedway countries) is Spain against the world footballing powers of Singapore.. ]

The fundamental problem with the format you suggest, would be the extreme mismatches in the quarter-finals, plus the problem in speedway that meetings without local interest are invariably financial disasters. The SWC is not really comparable with the World Cup in this respect, and the difference between the 1st and 16th ranked team in international speedway is probably akin to Spain playing Luxembourg or similar. I think it's better all round to have a multi-stage competition whereby some countries are seeded to the later stages so that everyone competes at a level appropriate to their relative strength. There is a 4TT format that can accommodate 5 teams per meeting, so you could easily expand the competition to 16 or even 18 teams using the current structure. If you went to 3 or even 4 qualifying rounds, you could accommodate up 20 teams if necessary.