Humphrey Appleby

Phillipe has already made the excuses (see post #12 of this thread). Mind you, I did have to laugh at the excuse that the necessary changes can't be made because of some forthcoming football matches. Have a look at the 'pitch' in the centre...

There's not really enough countries with sufficient strength in depth to track full test sides, and I think there's also a danger that you undermine the primacy of the SWC with another national representative competition. For me, if you were going to do this, I think it would be better to run home and away test series over a rolling period (e.g. like the ICC Test Championship), which would make a clear distinction between the SWC as an event, and the 'World League' as more a ranking competition. It would also allow the costs of each trip to be amortised over 2 or 3 meetings (e.g. when GB visited Sweden they'd ride 2-3 tests, and vice-versa). Getting back to the original subject of the thread though, a Champions League will never really be credible with the current speedway set-up. It needs to be run more like the Super-15 in rugby union - i.e. a standalone competition between selected teams who sign riders specifically for that competition, ideally with some sort of rider sharing/draft. So for example - 4 teams from Britain, 4 from Poland, and maybe 3 from Sweden and 1 from Denmark in a regional conference type format ('British', 'Continental' and 'Scandinavian' focusing on 'local' derbies and reducing travel. Let's say home and away in each conference (6 matches), home against one other conference (4 matches) and away against the other conferences (4 matches). If you combined two inter-conference matches in each away trip, that would only require two long trips during the season. Winner of each conference + one wildcard go to the 'playoffs', which would ensure every country has a representative to maintain interest. We can argue about the exact make-up of the teams and the format, but this is more what speedway should be aiming at.

I'm not sure the sport has hugely moved on sponsorship wise. Take away the tourist boards and equipment suppliers, and you have Monster as probably the only company anyone has heard of, and they noticeably haven't announced how much they're sponsoring which is normally something that gets trumpeted. Funny you should mention KFC, because I don't think they paid up and BSI had to take legal action.

I'm sure BSI and their shills would very much like to distract attention from the fiasco by blaming the riders, but I'm sure many if not all of them would have fully appreciated the consequences of not putting on a show at Warsaw. I very much doubt it was just about the track alone, but a number of issues that have been building up. It's hardly that this is one-off, and simply smacks of poor supervision, lack of investment in basic equipment, and/or poor choices of contractor on BSI's part. In fact, if you look at BSI's parent company IMG(UK) who essentially provide the staff, they've also been involved in a few fiascos of their own in recent years.

Which is why they refused to ride in Warsaw. Who do they think is responsible for the fiasco? How many World Finals were abandoned halfway through? Are you really trying to equate the sport's premier event with grassroots speedway? Would you expect a World Cup Final pitch to be prepared in the same way as for Sunday league park football? They should find more reliable contractors then. They are ultimately responsible for putting on the show - no-one else. I'm also sure not why 'contract out' should be in quotes. Presumably they do actually have contracts with the local organisers and other facilitators of each GP? The lack of supervision and ongoing quality control issues point firmly to the problem being with BSI. If planes keep falling out of the sky, would you find it acceptable if the airline blamed the outsourced maintenance? Of course you wouldn't, and the airline would lose its operating licence as indeed happens when issues are identified with airline procedures. So the blame management has already begun then? All a predictable pattern once again. The FIM is in no way responsible for the starting gate not working, the state of the track, or the poor communications inside the stadium. They are responsible for ensuring the staging promoter has met the required (safety) standards outlined in the regulations, officiating the meeting, and any judicial processes - nothing much more. You might reasonably blame them for allowing the meeting to start or continue on a sub-standard track, for not ensuring the starting gate was reliable, or with inadequate communication methods in place. You might also point the finger at not recalling a rider erroneously excluded from race, but all of these issues are down to organisational inadequacies of the promotion in the first place. BTW - I officiated at a kart meeting in rural Australia at the weekend. Even they managed to not only have telemetry from race control to screens in the pits, but to the Internet as well. Yet BSI will have us believe we have to rely on smoke signals in the 21st century (although it seems even that would have been better than what they had in Warsaw).

Where would Australia hold their home meetings for that matter? Not very practical to hold them Down Under when it wasn't the speedway season there.

The two minute clock wasn't functioning either...?

I wouldn't think there's more than a couple of thousand riders in the world in all track racing disciplines (if that), so assuming an average of 2-3 engines each (top riders will of course have more), perhaps 5-6,000 engines?

I'd have said not having a working starting gate (or replacement) in a GP is a bit like forgetting to put up the goalposts in a World Cup Final. Regardless though, the riders have put up with one crap track after the next over the years, and yet in what should be the crowning glory of a GP in the capital of the world's most important speedway country, they apparently all decide to throw their toys out the pram over an allegedly 'not as crap as some' track. I think you seriously have to ask why they felt the need to take that action, but rather than ask or attempt to answer that question, the Spar instead reports anecdotal observations from ex-riders who admit they didn't actually see the meeting, quotes from known how-shall-we-say speedway eccentrics, and alleged investigations of the FIM President who probably doesn't even know or care what speedway is.

Yawn. You're trotting out the same old nonsense, but no-one other than the shills and sycophants are convinced anymore. Warsaw was an utter disaster for the sport, even by the standards of the previous incompetence that's gone before. For goodness sake try to salvage some journalistic credibility by distancing yourself from this fiasco. By which I mean a hard hitting editorial from the senior management of a (formerly) respected industry journal pointing the finger of blame at where the blame lies.

Yet you chose to print the comments. I think many of us know about Tommy Rander, but much of the speculation and innuendo could be dispelled with some straightforward investigation and publication of what actually happened. Instead all we get is rehashing of press releases (e.g.. Peter Oakes managed to make a whole article out of a press release we could perfectly well read for ourselves), and various 'opinions' from the likes of Jason Crump and Tommy Rander. The one thing that Tommy Rander did get right though, is that BSI are inept and Bellamy should carry the can for it.

Darcy Ward all over again...?

I think the point was for starts. Why should tapes actually be necessary, with the attendant potential failures, if you can electronically measure whether riders have jumped the star? Why can't riders watch for a green light going out, just as they can watch for the tapes going up? If would also save all the delays to replace the tapes when riders do go through them. Just as when the tape touching rule was brought in, I'm sure it'll take a short while for riders to adapt, and then they'd just get on with it.

Oreti Park would make a great GP venue... I thought Western Springs was a pre-existing speedway track, even if they did tart it up for the GP?

That list has probably not been updated for at least 10 years - I know because I compiled the original version back in the 90s. There probably are still sufficient permanent speedway venues around to host GPs, most of which wouldn't need stadia more than 15-20K. The problem of course, is that BSI want to extract licence fees from the venues, and most tourist boards are not interested in supporting events held in the middle of fields and forests.

It's a shame the article got relegated to several pages in. Tommy Rander can be something of a controversial character, but if his claims are correct that riders collectively spat their dummies after being threatened with fines by BSI, then it's astonishing that it somehow failed to be uncovered by the investigative journalism last week. Of course, Olsen is being further hung out to dry in the article, so that may be the motivation behind Rander being allowed to speak his mind. However, someone has finally dared to publicly suggest that BSI might not actually be that good at running the SGP, and all this 'scientific controlled track building' is a load of baloney. Made me smile! Interesting to see the interview with Jason Crump who was commenting on a track he admitted he hadn't seen, but the bit about transponders was well made. Speedway must be just about the only motor sport in the 21st century that doesn't use transponders, and whilst Philippe has in the past tried to convince that the cost of these is prohibitively expensive, that's frankly a load of cobblers.

The fact of the matter is there will always be more preferable days on which to run speedway regardless of whether it's promoted properly or not, and this will differ from track to track. Top-flight British speedway could likely settle on just couple of race days if were determined, but the point is that if Fridays or Saturdays are the best night on which to run British speedway, then it should run those nights rather than worry about fitting around the requirements of specific riders. Frankly though, I think the best promoter in the world would struggle to sell speedway in its current state. It needs substantial investment in stadia, presentation and format, but the sport is of such minor interest nowadays, who with the money is going to touch it with a bargepole? The sport either needs someone to buy (let's say) 8 tracks and run the whole thing in a standardised way with centrally contracted riders, or reverting to an amateur/subsistence level running with much cheaper costs and trying to rebuild from the grassroots.

Well, race on days that are even more uneconomic...

So you say, but has anyone really done any analysis to back-up this assertion? I'd bet many of the riders would still get the sponsorship by virtue of riding in Poland, and how many are really making a lot of money off the back of being in the SGP? Of course, BSI (in both its pre- and post-IMG incarnations) will tell the riders they're providing a platform for personal sponsorships, because if the riders buy into that (which they largely have until now), it means all the more profit for both them and the FIM. In a lot of other sports though, competitors share a substantial percentage of the overall income from the event, in addition to getting individual sponsorships on the back of their participation. The prize money paid out by the SGP as a percentage of revenue would seem to be quite a lot lower than in other televised sports. Maybe riders and organisers are finally cottoning on... Yes, but that's only if you win. A couple of grand for finishing last is unlikely to even cover your travel expenses in most cases. If also look at the average earnings of even the world champion across the season, it probably won't even cover their engine bills. It's clear there isn't the money to pay massive wages, but the SGP effectively makes 3 million profit if you take into account the money paid to the FIM, and IMG also charges BSI nearly a million quid in administrative costs. The prize money could reasonably be doubled, and still leave everyone with a decent profit. No doubt, but it's the old buck passing game. Either way, both organisations appear to be doing quite nicely out of the arrangement, but without the riders there wouldn't be a show and they're the ones getting pretty short-changed. Were we not told though, that IMG were this slick global marketing company that are experienced in leveraging the commercial opportunities and taking the SGP to new heights? Total revenue appears to have hardly changed in the 6-7 years they've been running things, and has probably decreased in real terms if you take inflation into account.

In the grand scheme of things perhaps, but professional riders have bills to pay and perhaps someone is finally questioning why they should ride for a relative pittance to enrich someone else, regardless of whether they're riding in something masquerading as a world championship. Riders should be getting together and negotiating a larger percentage of the SGP takings, but they all seem too short-sighted to work out who's really making the money and of course you're not going to tell them. Reading a good book at the moment about the corruption in College Bowl American football. Amazingly, despite college football generating huge revenue, the bowls are run by private promoters who don't even pay for travel and accommodation for the participating teams, far less any sort of payout to the colleges. Colleges teams do it for the 'prestige' and 'honour' even though they often lose money that has to come out of their academic programmes, yet the bowl 'administrators' still get their huge salaries, rights fees and expenses. The bowl named as being amongst the worst in this respect, not to mention being linked to all sorts of fraud and abuse of its non-for-profit status, was the Sugar Bowl. Have a guess who the rights holders are?

Short answer, no. Are F1 cars street legal? Does the fact that Honda make F1 engines influence me in any way to buy a Honda GX engine for my lawnmower? Even touring cars are in reality a fair way removed from something you can buy to drive on the roads, and if a speedway bike could be made street legal, then speedway would cease to resemble the sport it currently is. I'd agree there might be cost efficiencies if speedway could utilise a mass-produced engine used for a variety of disciplines, but even if you could find one with the combination of power and weight, it would almost certainly still need to be adapted and tuned for speedway. We use off-the-shelf engines in low-end karting, but even though the purchase price is low, you need to spend at least 3 times more to make them race competitive before you even get into selected parts (the latter of which negates any cost savings through sealing).

The feudal system was abolished years ago - no-one is obliged to work indefinitely for whom they were originally apprenticed, nor even work in their country of birth. Equally, British speedway shouldn't bend over backwards to pay money it can't afford, or race on days that are uneconomic to accommodate supposed superstars.

And why not? If he's already got good sponsors and race contracts, all the SGP will do is lose him money as the prize money is terrible. Maybe he also doesn't want to unnecessarily risk himself on crap tracks either. All very well being world champion, but it won't pay the bills in speedway.

If British speedway paid the pay, the top riders would amazingly find ways to fit it into their schedules as they did in the old days.

Yes, but to be fair, Super Rugby is not really 'domestic' and NZ competition is a high standard to start with. Similarly with English rugby - really only the French League that's comparable worldwide.