Humphrey Appleby

It's their ball because they put up the money and carry the losses. You can't realistically expect people without any financial stake in the sport to ultimately be calling the shots - no matter how badly it's being run - because there's no guarantee that them spending the money of others will actually do any better. The sad reality is that speedway has such a poor demographic and has fallen so far in public consciousness that no serious administrator, marketer or financier would want to have anything to do with it, even if the sport could afford them. The sport has dug itself into a hole - partly although not totally of its own making - and it's very difficult to see how it can dig itself out. What should happen though, is that the promoters set the framework and underlying conditions for running the sport each year (or ideally over a longer period), and then an independent Commissioner or Commission is responsible for implementing that. It's the way most serious sports have gone in recent years, and ideally a commission would also include independent directors with marketing, finance and legal skills. However, speedway is too impoverished and sadly Mickey Mouse for that to happen in any serious way.

You need to separate the concept of a body independent from an existing sanctioning organisation, and independent leadership running the sport. An independent body will solve nothing if the promoters are still making the day-to-day decisions, as that's really where the problem lies. Those putting their money into the sport should absolutely be setting the directions - however good or bad they are at doing that - but how these directions should be implemented on a day-to-day basis should be left to an independent person or persons. This is quite different though, from a sanctioning body such as the FIM and ACU who have wider responsibilities for motor sport and may or not be acting in the best interests of the speedway.

The time for speedway to have done it was 20-25 years ago. The professional speedway leagues/promoters bodies should have got together and set-up their own organisation to take control and the profits from the SGP/SWC etc.. or at least obtained some sort of autonomy from the FIM to run their own affairs in the way that F1 teams did years ago. However, through a complete lack of vision and petty rivalries they've allows themselves to be divided and conquered and outside entities have come in to skim off what little cream there is. The problem with doing your own thing though, is that you have to set-up all the training and accreditation of officials, homologation of equipment, and track safety inspections almost from scratch. You can leach off the official authorities for a while, but eventually need to put all this place yourself. Plus in some countries you may need to get separate approvals or even new laws passed to run legally if you're outside an official sanctioning body. Whilst I'm more involved in the 4-wheel side of things, I know we run into all sorts of approvals and insurance difficulties if we run outside of Motorsports UK. Others do it (and I've done it as an individual), but I'd definitely be concerned as an organiser about the potential legal liabilities if something went badly wrong.

National licenses are an outdated concept anyway. High-time there was a single international licence for professional competitors.

Couldn’t really make out what was the point of the article. Seemed to be a lot of whining about what Poland has decided to do, but not actually stating the FIM’s position or what it could do. But may also be the way it was related in the Spar...

Much the same with many sportspersons, even in the rarefied world of the EPL or whatever. They make it in their chosen sport because they're talented and usually dedicated at doing that, not because they're good at business. And only a handful of people in any given professional sport make serious money, and even if you can make a fairly good living wage, you'll usually only have a short time in which you're doing that. There's also the issue that successful sportspersons will usually have always been successful from a young age, will invariably have people blowing smoke up their ar**s, and will often have others sorting their lives out for them. So they don't have perspective that the money isn't always going to be coming in, and they're not necessarily going to be successful at anything else they do. Plus it makes them vulnerable to hangers-on and those trying to rip them off. We've been doing some work for one of the major rugby bodies, so I've got to know some of the former professional players. This is a relatively mainstream sport where the players are generally better educated than most, yet it's shocking how far so many fall when their playing days are finished. But they way they're treated when become surplus to requirements, simply dumped and suddenly losing their entire support network, is actually also appalling. And of course speedway is even further down the food chain in terms of money, prestige and public image where some benefactor is willing to help you out with some work.

Of course it is. Even high profile athletes got away with it for years.

I couldn't care less if people take soft drugs recreationally. Plenty do, and I suspect if you conducted a random test of the whole UK population, you'd find a high percentage who do indulge in it and function perfectly well in their jobs. So not sure why people expect speedway riders to be any different. Of course, it's different to be under the influence if you're actually riding - the same as alcohol - although the likes of cannabis hangs around in the body long after it's had any deleterious effect. It sounds like Garrity doing harder stuff though, which is a different matter.

There wasn't anything like the competition from foreign leagues in those days, nor the Speedway Grand Prix that required complicated travel schedules. The Daily Mirror Tournament, was I think a one-off as well.

I think very few countries could put out competitive test match teams, which would require anywhere from 6 to 8 riders. It would essentially preclude countries (e.g. Australia and the US) where it's impractical for them to stage home matches, whilst riding matches at neutral venues would probably be a financial disaster. As it stands, people have already pointed out the flaws of the Best Pairs format where your team is only riding once every 3 heats or so during a meeting. There might be a case for a handful of countries to stage a separate Test Championship linking bi-lateral home and away matches/series together over a season or even longer. But when you'd find time in an already crowded calendar is another matter.

No doubt, but it's the trade-off between scoring points and making money in the here-and-now, and the possibility of scoring more points and more money in the future. All I can say is that I'm glad I didn't choose speedway rider as my career...

Didn't he also have an idea to put a chicane in the bends...

Problem is that Gate 4 can sometimes be the best gate on certain tracks and in certain conditions!

Rider averages will never be an accurate reflection of true ability because - at least in Britain - each riding position meets the opposition riders a different number of times and under different circumstances. Reserves in particular tend to have easier races in comparison to heat leaders, and the No. 2 position in the classic heat formula generally had easier opposition than the rest of the top 5, although the downside was that Heat 8 was always the obvious place to do a (double) tactical substitution. But as with cricket, there's all sorts of factors such as when you're put into bat or expected to bowl. Case in point is Freddie Flintoff who's batting and bowling averages were never exceptional by classic all-rounder standards, yet every team in the world would have been happy for him to play for them.

Usual story of football teams living beyond their means and then losing tenure or title of their own ground, thereby leaving them at the mercy of property developers. Beyond foolish as the ground is often their only tangible asset, but since when did football and sense go together?

Can't think it would be that difficult to come up with a compromise format with 3+1 rider teams. Or run the Pairs event on Day 1, with a proper World Cup on Day 2.

In most World Cup type tournaments, the finalists have usually not competed against all the other teams earlier in the tournament, and have often not met themselves until the Final. It's therefore not possible to say they've met the strongest teams, regardless of their early results. In the standard Best Pairs format, every team will have already ridden against every team before reaching the Final - in fact twice in the SON. It's therefore a bit farcical to decide the result on the basis of a contrived scoring system after 43 previous heats. You could have still have a Final, but give the team scoring more points in the earlier rounds the advantage of a point or something.

Best Pairs competitions by their nature are not well suited to knockout or winner-takes-all formats. There's, what, a one-third chance in each heat of each team scoring the same number of points unless you have a contrived scoring system, so you can really only go on accumulated points over a number of heats. Ultimately it's a flawed format for a major (televised) team competition.

There's never been the money to make the SGP a full-time circus, nor probably enough tracks able and willing to host the number of rounds necessary to make it full time circus. You'd probably need to be running every week from April to September, which is 26 rounds or so (although some of those could be the SoN). I think you'd end-up with spectator fatigue seeing the same few riders week after week, even putting aside the issues that you'd ruin the Polish leagues.

Simple matter of economics. Poland gets better crowds and presumably commands better sponsorship than the SGP.

Depends on the rules of the national championships. If you're a dual-national or dual-licence, then why shouldn't be able to ride in both? Might even be a requirement of holding a particular licence.

I doubt it's all paid up front. Assuming that the FIM still remains responsible for paying the prize money though, even if they quadrupled it, I still don't think it would match what GP riders can command in Poland.

Not really. The SGP doesn't pay anything like a living wage to the riders, whereas the Polish leagues do. It's the FIM and BSI who've been wagging the dog for years, effectively getting top flight performers at cut prices.

Double headers might work at some tracks, but could equally be both a racing and financial disaster so not sure you'd want to do it every race weekend. And of course, surely it would start eating into the Polish League programme? If they're going to have a 2-day event, would prefer the field was expanded to 24 or even 32 riders and they run some sort of qualifying event on the Saturday. Or run a GP Challenge on the Saturday (like F2 or F3) for different prospective GP riders, with a couple of places in the main event for the most successful of those. However, I suspect for the same reason that the field was cut from 24 to 16 riders, there isn't the money to bring more riders to each event.

So they can't do anything online in the meantime, including refunding payments that were probably made online? Utterly pathetic excuse. Are you ordered to say this stuff, or do you actually believe the crap you're fed?