E I Addio

Oh I agree TWK, Briggo has been there done it and got the t-shirt while Darcy has still got it all to do. What I meant was that Darcy excites me in the way that Briggo used to. He doesn't bother with all the technicalities, he just goes out and wins in the old-fashioned way by keeping the throttle open longer than anyone else. That's why Briggo is regarded by so many including me as the greatest.

I saw the last of his British Championship wins at West Ham (I think it was the last). Still have the programme. Absolutely stunning performance. The No 2 gate wasn't working. Ivan Mauger struggled to a second place off of it and everyone else was either third or last off No2 gate when their turn came. Then towards the end of the meeting out comes Briggo off gate 2 and shatters the opposition on his way to his fourth win of the night.. Then he went on to a 15 point maximum literally a class above the rest of the field. Probably the most memorable performance I have seen. People rave over Mauger and Rickardson etc, who were admittedly consistent but to me, when Briggo hit his best form there was never another rider in speedway like it , at least not until Darcy Ward came along.

That's not quite the point of the discussion. The rules require that the starting marshall and the referee ensure that there is a fair and equal start. You may take the view if you wish, that its OK to play the odds on getting a roller but frankly when we are talking about a run -off to decide the highest honour in speedway I think most fans would want to see the best rider win, not the one who takes advantage of a dodgy starting procedure that did not comply with the requirement for a fair and equal start. We all know about Polish referee's even in modern times.. The real point of the debate is not Mauger -v-Szczakiel but the One-off World Final -v- the GP system. My point is that there will always be questionable refereeing decisions but a GP series evens out the luck element. If you take a couple of modern examples riders like Antonio Lindback and Freddie Lindgren are capable of winning a GP but few , if any fans would argue they could genuinely be regarded as World Champions, at least not yet anyway. For me the Szczakiel win was the start of a slide that was compounded by Egon Muller's 1983 win and made the case for a GP system with rounds in each country.

No, Ian the 1973 World Final run-off was the biggest stitch up in the history of speedway. In front of 140,000 Poles there was no way a Pole would be prevented from winning. That was the meeting when Dave Lanning made his famous comment that the Poles were making up the rules as they went along. He was not reprimanded for that so one must accept the validity of it. Look at the youtube clip. The riders approach the tapes, the start marshal doesn't even put the riders under starter orders when the Pole rolls forward and the referee lets the tapes go giving the Pole a flyer and catching the usually sharp gating Mauger by surprise. The Polish attitude is shown after the crash: Mauger is lying unconscious on the track and for all anybody knew at that stage his life could have been hanging in the balance but the race was not stopped but instead the Pole, in a disgraceful display of triumphalism allows his bike to drift wide on the next lap, missing the medics bu inches and showering the unconscious Mauger and the medics with shale. That meeting was the beginning of the end for the old one-off World Final.www.youtube.com/watch?v=HQplGWLW7Zw (EDIT if it won't come up just type 1973 World Final run-off -Youtube in your search engine and you should get it.)