Ian

Apparently he was fined the equivalent of almost £4000. It makes you wonder what the penalty would have been had the little lad actually done something naughty.

No trick intended. Clearly my knowledge of West Lothian from the air doesn't match your own. Thanks for the answer though.

The picture which goes with that article - does anyone know which stadium it depicts?

Iris is right though, Tsunami. In the fifty years I have been watching speedway the only changes I can recall to track surfaces are that they have become generally slicker and that they no longer seem to use sawdust on wet tracks. There may, of course, be a perfectly good reason for the latter - I don't know. I apologise if I have posted this before, but somewhere out there must lie a solution to the wet track problem. After all, it can't be beyond a species which managed to send men to the moon and back to come up with some more weatherproof surface than we have now. My best suggestion is that the BSPA, or FIM or whatever, offer a research project to a number of technical universities aimed at finding a better surface material. It wouldn't cost that much, and we'd have some of the country's finest brains working on it. Alternatively, we could all be defeatists and just sit back and hope for the best that next summer is a bit drier than this one has been, which I suspect is what will happen.

Probably the reason is that air fares fluctuate wildly inside and outside of the school holidays. For example, I just looked at tickets between London and Dubrovnik around 31st October, which is over £400 with British Airways. Five days later (after the English half-term holiday) the same flight is £50. Now that's on a short 2.5 hour flight, so scale that up to the 24-hour haul to Australia and the cost differences can be dramatic. This seems to happen with riders every year. It's unprofessional, but you can see the reason for it.

To some extent it was the survival of the fittest, and I believe that Wimbledon won the National leaugue (which was the first tier) for a significant number of consecutive seasons. Was that a problem? Not really. Wimbledon fans seemed happy enough to watch large home wins every week, and the attraction of such a strong visiting team ensured a good payday for the other promoters. The real answer is to allow team-building to a fixed average, but to give discounted averages to riders based on how long they have stayed with the one team. I cannot see the attraction of supporting a team which changes riders every couple of weeks.

From the top drawer, most likely.... sorry Nige.

This really is the most unwarranted attack. Tsunami's not all that old.

He'll be wearing a pink cushion next!

So, to summarise. The plain fact is that you actually know nothing at all, and your entire post is constructed from hearsay, gossip and speculation. Is life in the Borders really so dull that you have to resort to this sort of nonsense to keep yourself amused?

I have to agree with this. Speedway likes to bill itself as a "family sport". Nicki Pedersen' s choice of language is at odds with that description. Some years ago one of his fellow Danish internationals described Pedersen to me as "a great rider, but just a yob". Sadly he seems to go out of his way to prove that too many times.

Old Meadowbank wasn't all that big - 363 yards (332 metres). However, it had very wide sweeping bends which made it look big, and the short straights meant that riders generally weren't too spaced out. Glasgow's White City was exactly the opposite, with very long straights and hairpin bends. Compared with these West Ham looked huge, but I never thought much of the racing there. Perhaps that's because speedway is a bit like fags and booze in that you get hooked on a specific brand and nothing else is ever quite the same.

Ivan Miller, eh? Does the DVD cover the race against Berwick where Miller knocked Willie Templeton off and brother Doug wrestled him from his bike? If it does then I'll happily buy a copy. To this day that's one of the funniest things I ever saw at a speedway meeting!

My Slovenian is also limited, but I can tell you that "Kranjec" means a Slovenian. Croatians call them "Kecec", after a cartoon character.

I recall them being Bears during the 1960s. I think the use of the Teeside name came about following name changes in local government.