Humphrey Appleby

Getting Philippe to do the GP programmes...

So would be about 3-4 times more per year than what IMG-BSI were paying, although the Eurosport deal covers multiple disciplines not just track racing, right?

Many of them grew up as Afghan refugees in Pakistan. Not 100% sure about Kenya, but think most of them were native too, whilst Namibia was a South Africa territory until 1990, so many Namibian players would essentially have had South African connections.

Is that $100K or $1m? And is that per year? If it's $100K per year, that's significantly below what BSI were paying. Even if it's $1 million per year, that's probably less than half than what the FIM was getting previously.

Has it actually been announced how much the deal is worth? The IMG/BSI deal wasn't worth massive bucks in the grand scheme of things. Caveat emptor. If Discovery/Eurosport haven't done due diligence then more fool them, but I'd find that highly unlikely given how long they've been in the sports broadcasting business. Of course, any new deal is going to be accompanied by a load of publicity hype from both parties, but I suspect both understand the actual realities.

Thought the inclusion of Zimbabwe, Kenya, Ireland, Afghanistan and earlier Sri Lanka in various tournaments was actually a positive move. Certainly Sri Lanka, Zimbabwe, Ireland and Afghanistan progressed to test status (even if the latter three are only token test nations) and Sri Lanka even went on to win the World Cup, so wouldn't call them 'non-cricketing' nations. Would agree the World Cup over-extended with too many weak teams from 2003 onwards, but really the whole thing only got scaled back because India and Pakistan both managed to go out in the first round. But ODI cricket is not real cricket anyway. There's still really only 9 test nations...

Fully understand the reasoning, but World Rugby haven’t turned their World Cup into a sevens tournament so more countries can be competitive. That’s a tournament with plenty of one-sided matches. If you want a competition for the minor nations then run a World Pairs for them, but even if you can only muster up 6-8 countries for a proper team event, I don’t see a problem with that. There’s hardly any countries that play test cricket, but no-one would suggest that’s not the pinnacle of the sport.

I'd agree that on paper it looked ideal, and Finland deserved a GP more than many countries that staged them. But yet again poorly executed - an inspection of the stadium by someone who understood something about the technicalities should have quickly revealed the difficulties of putting in a decent track. At that point you make it a condition the track has to go over the football pitch (which was non-existent at that point anyway), some solution needs to be found for the drains, or whatever the excuse ended-up being for putting in a rubbish track. If not, then you politely say thanks but no thanks. I ran a motor racing series for 15 years and even though it was amateur low-level stuff, I'd still always personally go and inspect a track that I'd not raced at before, or recently. As the series grew we increasingly got offers from circuits which was nice, but sometimes you had to turn them down because of inadequate facilities or geographical location.

I really don't see the point in speedway trying to go to 'other markets' when it's pretty much at death's door in its core markets. Maybe if a local promoter was prepared to pay substantial amounts to stage a GP, but that's really not going to happen with a sport that has virtually no public profile anywhere in the world. Local despots are only going to be interested in things with high profiles where they can be seen patronising, and I'm afraid no sheikh is ever going to get their robes dusty at a speedway track. And to what end? It's highly unlikely that a GP would spawn a thriving speedway scene in somewhere like Ireland or the UAE, and I think speedway has already been tried in places like Spain and Portugal with no success. Maybe somewhere like Amsterdam (or more likely Arnhem) would be worth a punt as there's at least some speedway in the country already, plus it's close enough to bigger speedway markets to pull some fans from there. But really the sport needs to be focusing on making the experience better in the countries where it still has some support. As for Argentina, I suspect a lot of GP staging is based around 'a bloke someone knows'...

Needs to be re-iterated that it's not a proper team competition.

Where did the SGP actually go that was a 'non-speedway' country? I can't think of a single GP that was held in a country that didn't have at least one speedway track that holds meetings every year. Yes, speedway might not have a massive presence in the likes of Italy, Finland and Croatia, but speedway is a minority sport in every country where it's ridden (including Poland). A 'non-speedway' country would be somewhere like the UAE and Malaysia that the Spar occasionally speculated about on slow news days. And let's not forget that GPs were held in these alleged non-speedway countries because they were either cheap to stage or because there was some promoter there willing to fork over a staging fee. You'd hope that in return they'd get access to the promotional, marketing, organisational and technical skills of BSI, plus the Rolodex of potential sponsors, yet it seems local promoters were largely left to their own devices which is why stuff like no signage or insufficient beer happened. Tampere was a disaster because the stadium was totally unsuitable for a track and the racing was a poor spectacle. That should have been pointed out at the start by people who you'd thought would know something about building a track. Riga was a comical joke - the stadium was clearly in no fit state to stage a GP, and it seems there was no supervision over the preceding months to check how things were progressing. Speedway is a hard sell at the best of times, but fiascos like the two GPs mentioned above will certainly not endear you to existing fans let alone win over new ones.

I'd question it. I'm not suggesting that keeping the old World Final format was the way forward, but the latter World Finals that were held in decent stadia had pretty decent audiences compared with most GPs today. After about 1993 though, these events all seemed to be held in small and often remote venues with few other attractions, and the results were there to see. But I'd have thought even Coventry managed to pull crowds that some GPs would be happy to have today, and of course the Millennium Stadium (or the other indoor venues) wasn't built yet with its stakeholders needing to fill an expensive loss-making venue. BSI - unlike the BSPA and other speedway promoters - did understand how to leverage money out of local municipalities and tourist boards, and how to court the relatively new cable/satellite channels desperate for cheap content. And I suppose at one point their founder did harbour ambitions to be a sort of Bernie Ecclestone, taking the SGP to better venues and new markets around the world. But when it came to the crunch, there were really only a couple of prestige venues in any given year, with the rest of the series filled with the sort of tracks like Landshut and Linkoping plus the obligatory Polish ones just as in the old days. Other than the Millennium Stadium and perhaps Prague, few other venues proved sustainable in the long-term and the SGP never ended up going to 'new markets' except for the handful of GPs in Australia and NZ, and that was really only because some other mugs were found to throw away their money. Plus there were numerous fiascos with GPs being called off, moved at a day's notice to another venue, and indoor meetings being abandoned with fans in the stadium. In the end, IMG/BSI seemed to either realise the SGP wasn't really going anywhere or just lost interest, and seemed to settle on running the competition as cheaply as they could get away with. Although ironically, going to proper speedway tracks seemed to improve things in some respects. I'll say in fairness that I think speedway is a hard sell, with expensive set-up costs, vulnerability to the vagaries of the weather (seemingly even indoors ), the sport having no sort of high profile anywhere other than Poland (and even that's debatable), an unattractive spectator demographic which is somewhat reflected by the rather thin list of sponsors, and virtually no wealthy patrons or those that can open doors to sources of funding. But a change of promoter is long overdue and the rights should have been re-tendered years ago. It will be interesting to see what Discovery/Eurosport can do with speedway, although they did make Ski Jumping cult viewing so who knows?

The SON is really nothing more than a Best Pairs competition with an U21 rider chucked in.

The fairest thing would be to give the higher place to the lower ranked rider - whether based on the championship standings from the previous season, or the intermediate classification.

It's ridiculous that speedway is reliant on such ancient and inconsistent mechanisms. You could have a laser start gate that switches off when the race starts, but could detect false starts. It would also make it much harder to anticipate the start.

One minute the government is 'concerned' about the number of rising cases, the next it's saying no social distancing is needed in theatres and sports venues. Doesn't seem to know its a**e from its elbow. For the record, sports stadiums in Queensland have been open to spectators for weeks; albeit with reduced capacity. No face masks required either.

That absolutely sums it up. Speedway is a popular 'regional sport' in Poland, akin to how Rugby League is in Britain. Most/many people in Britain know what Rugby League is, but it doesn't mean they follow it.

Not sure why you and Grand Central put so much faith in politicians. Most are far stupider than you give them credit for, and generally make decisions on what will make them more popular / less unpopular tomorrow than what's better in the long run. The simple fact is that a 'Spanish Flu' type scenario has long been postulated, and the spread and mitigation of other infectious diseases long been studied, including quite recently. That Grand Central and yourself are apparently ignorant of this, and prefer to believe government propaganda that it's the first time anyone has ever had to deal with such things, sums up the sheep-like mentality of much of the population that's been scared into submitting to the edicts of their supposed lords and masters. There are far more sensible measures that could be taken that would allow a modicum of normality for the least likely to die age groups, whilst limiting economic destruction and the loss of important social and sporting institutions. Whilst sport obviously has to come a long way down the list of priorities, there seems to be little real scientific analysis applied to countries declared to be COVID-19 hotspots.

There have been pandemics before, and there has been planning for them - for many years in fact. But for some reason this time, governments are taking panicky knee-jerk reactions to every development, even though these are in many cases entirely predictable. And the UK government has been amongst the worst for its inconsistency.

They're just making it up as they go along...

We've had this discussion before, but I don't think he'd have made for a good supremo for various reasons. And I think we really only ever heard his narrative on his non-appointment. Undoubtedly a very good promoter, a good understanding of how to run sport, and someone with substantial vision. But the reason why speedway has ended-up in the mess it has, is due to the majority of promoters who couldn't or didn't want to see the bigger picture, and/or who were unprepared to take the leaps of faith that were necessary. Anyone running a member-based association has to accept there will be multiple opinions on how things should be done that you'll have to defer to. You can rarely do things the way you'd prefer, and you have to have considerable diplomatic skills to steer a course that keeps the majority of your members happy. John Berry would have got frustrated very quickly, and likely fallen out with people over trivial matters in the way that he did. That's not the qualities you need for such a role.

I'd guess BSI will have contracts with television and sponsors and need to try to put on meetings so they won't have to repay some or all of the money (or conversely they'll receive some money from those sources). I guess monies are also contractually due to the FIM, although maybe they'd agree to waive some or all of this because of the exceptional circumstances.

It's looking a bit like the old and not missed FIM Champions Cup.

I'd have thought not running speedway would actually save money. The major sports have so much television and sponsorship money riding on them, that it's still worth their while to run behind closed doors. I can't see though, how speedway could be run without spectators as that must be its major/only source of income, at least in Britain. And it's been practicing social distancing in the stadiums for years... Even for the SGP, running without spectators must be really be getting close to being unviable.

You do have to ask who's advising them on their communications. Surely the main point is also the risk of spectators spreading it around?