HenryW

Can you explain why you think that should count against him? Grigory raced in the World Cup match that he was able to race in. Should it not count more against FIM events being staged in the UK?

Just to be pedantic, the last 4 One off World Finals were all held in August. Since 1980 it was always held on the last weekend in August or first weekend in September, with the exception of the last ever one which was held on the 20th of August. That means the Torun GP is maybe more appropriately timed. At least Greg would have still been in a run off for the title in that one

Bringing back Nicki?

I think it's more complicated than just a case of choosing money over SGP for PePe. As a rider who has consistently been one of the best in the Extraliga in recent years (there are only 4 GP riders with higher averages in 2011) I am pretty sure PePe would have been able to get another team place for the money he wants. However, he was born in Zielona Gora, captains the club and loves racing for them. A couple of years ago he signed a long term contract and declared he wanted to end his career with Falubaz. He clearly doesn't want to give that up just to chase a dream in the SGP, and who can blame him? I just find it sad that he has been put in this position by the Polish authorities.

Just to clarify, I don't believe that PePe has withdrawn from the SGP series just yet. He has merely refused to confirm that he will race in it. Instead he has confirmed that he will continue to race with Zielona Gora. He still has hopes that BSI will wait for him while Zielona Gora argue their case that 2 GP riders should be allowed in the team. Does that work, though? Ultimately it just makes the lesser riders more valuable to teams. It would be interesting to see a comparison of the wage bills between Poole's team this year and their league winning team of 2003 to see just how much has been saved by the weakening of the Elite League.

It was reported that Matej Zagar was invited to take part if any of the 4 refused their place. However, Matej has already rejected this offer and signed to race for Gorzow alongside Tomasz Gollob next season.

It will be interesting if Zielona Gora do actually stick with Hancock. He was the lowest averaging of the 3 they had this year and I thought that Jonsson and Protasiewicz both had multi-year contracts with them while Greg was on a single year deal.

Well, I thought I offered an argument defending it in my previous post, linked here, but I guess you didn't think that initial paragraph was a defence or you just chose to ignore it.

Yes, I agree that it's probably harder to get into the series than to fall out of it. However, that is because the best riders don't generally just suddenly become bad. You seem to be arguing that the top 15 should be ever changing. That doesn't make sense to me as the top 15 in the World doesn't actually change very much year to year, and the averages in the big leagues backs this up. The riders in the World Final under the old system changed more often but that tended to be through the nature of the qualifying system employed. 1 bad day in any of the rounds, or an unfortunately timed injury, could easily see one of the best going out, leading to an inferior product in the World Final. That, IMO, was more unfair than what we have now. Just taking 2 examples from the latter years of the 1 off World Championship: In 1992 Hans Nielsen didn't make the Final (3rd in 91, 2nd in 93) In 1993 Tommy Knudsen didn't make the Final (5th in 92, 5th in 94) Both of those riders were CLEARLY in the top 16 in the World those years, yet failed to make the Final. No matter how bad you think the current system may be, surely you can see that it is better than a system that allows something like that to happen, unless you are actually not interested in finding the best rider in the World as a Champion. I'm not, and never have been, arguing that the current system is perfect (I'd prefer a return to a 24 rider series) but it's better than what used to be there when it comes to finding who is genuinely the best rider in the World...and isn't that the point of a World Championship?

If it's merchandise you are after, go to the Falubaz online store: http://www.falubaz.sklep.pl/index.html Or through google translate: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=pl&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.falubaz.sklep.pl%2Findex.html They seem to have expanded their products since I last looked. I'm not sure I've seen clubs selling boxer shorts and jeans before

OK. That's 3 riders from what, 50 years (?) of World Finals. As others have pointed out, Emil came in and Darcy has been invited in...and that's just in the last 3 years. It's clear that the opportunity is there if the riders are good enough. The simple fact is that riders seem to be reaching their peak at a later age these days, or at least maintaining their level for longer. I don't know for a fact as it's before my time and sadly the statistical history of British speedway isn't online, but I would assume that Moore, Collins and Lee were all fairly near the top of the sport in the league averages as well. If you look at the averages for the big leagues, the "old guys" are up top there too. It isn't just a "GP thing". That goes back to what I said before about the sport being more technical and professional than ever before. It's not easy for someone to jump straight in and be right there competing without having a really good backup team and lots of experience. This again can probably be explained by the increasing professionalism in the sport. No, it's not easy to just appear in the sport and be successful, because the bar is so much higher. IMHO, the sport is also less likely to attract late comers these days due to it's relatively low income compared to the top end of other motorcycle sports. I agree that it probably seems to be harder to make it to the top these days, but I don't think that has anything to do with there being a GP series. It's just that the sport has moved on, as almost all sports have. The level of professionalism and dedication in all sports has changed drastically in the last 25 to 30 years. You may have an argument that this isn't a good thing, but I genuinely don't think it's anything to do with the GP series or the opportunities available to good, young riders in it.

Personally, I thought Carter always looked completely out of place on a speedway bike. He somehow made it work, possibly just through his determination, but the likes of Loram and Havelock were far, far better on a speedway bike than Carter could ever have been if you ask me...

As iris has already pointed out, Darcy didn't just fail to qualify for the SGP in 2011 through the qualifying rounds, he failed to qualify for the SGP race off...And that was in a year that, as far as I can recall, had the least number of existing SGP riders in the qualifying series ever. There were 3 "semi finals" for the race off this year. Darcy came 8th in his. In case you don't know, in that meeting he was behind Lindback, Zagar, Ulamek, Madsen, Vaculik, Watt and Davidsson. In the other 2 semi finals Ljung, Walasek, Buczkowski, Protasiewicz, Kasprzak, Pedersen(Bj), Gustafsson, Kylmakorpi, Golubovski, Monberg, Andersen, Ruud, Hansen and Wolbert all finished higher than 8th. Look at that list of riders that did better than Darcy in the qualifiers this year...Do you still think he would have been fighting Greg for the World title in an old style one off final? Don't get me wrong, knowing what Darcy CAN do on a speedway bike, I suspect he was unlucky that day...BUT, that was what happened every year in the old system. The fact that he has been recognised as one of the best and offered a place despite his failure makes me think that this system works better, just as Emil's inclusion did the year he joined. Personally, I think you have made a better argument for the current system than the old one.

I suspect he will be back in Liga 1 next season if racing in Poland. I can't see him getting one of the 10 Extraliga places if they stick with the current plans. In order of Extraliga averages (showing only 2011 2012 GP riders), you have: 1. Hampel (10.50) 2. Gollob (9.67) 3. Crump (9.35) 4. Jonsson (9.31) 5. Protasiewicz (9.08) 6. N.Pedersen (8.65) 7. Hancock (8.58) 8. Holder (8.44) 9. Lindgren (7.75) 10. Bjerre (7.59) 11. B.Pedersen (6.81) 12. Harris (6.67) In the Polish Liga 1, you also had: 1. Ward (10.35) 2. Sajfutdinov (10.16) 3. Lindback (9.59) If you were running an Extraliga team next year, would you pick Harris as your only GP rider?

A bit of a delayed reply, but I am just catching up on this thread, and I don't think anyone else has made this point, so.... You say that Darcy would have given Greg a massive run for his money in a one off World Final this year. He would have needed to get into it first, and he failed to get past the semi finals of the SGP qualifying rounds when only one of the current GP riders was competing in them. Given this fact, I can't understand why you would be so confident of his ability to make the World Final with those other 14 riders involved in the qualifiers as well! Valid reasons for older riders dominating like never before? I would initially offer up the following two: 1. The sport is safer and medical treatment much better, allowing riders to race at their peak for longer. 2. The sport is more expensive, professional and technical than ever before, ensuring that experience and investment are much more important, which obviously the younger riders don't have as much of.

I haven't seen a list published for this year yet, I guess it's too early for that. However, this link contains the top earners in Polish Sport in 2010: http://www.najbogatsi.pl As you can see, Nicki Pedersen received 1.717 million zloty (£350,733 on current exchange rate) just from Stal Gorzow last year, which was actually down on his expected income due to him missing some matches with injury. This following article goes into detail about the income of some of the riders for last year and also discusses Jason Crump's 2011 contract with Rzeszow which was worth 2.8 million zloty (£571,724) assuming he scored over 200 points in the season, which he did. http://www.przegladsportowy.pl

No-one did it. It's an automatic filter to remove undesired words from the forum. Any use of the blacklisted words will be replaced before the post appears. You can see this in action if you use the preview option before adding your post.

The final result was: Holta, Lindbaeck, Pi Pawlicki, L.Bjerre, Watt, K.Bjerre Consolation final was: Andersen, Vaculik, Dryml, Suchanek, Pr Pawlicki, Busch

Czech TV might make it available on their site. Go to this page http://www.ceskatelevize.cz/tv-program/ to see their full TV listings. The "sledovat živě" link under the program details are links to live streaming. The Channel 4 live stream, which speedway is normally shown on, can be found here: http://www.ceskatelevize.cz/ct4/zive-vysilani/ If you are generally interested in Czech Speedway, they showed the Extraliga match from Mseno earlier this week and that meeting is available to watch on their site now: http://www.ceskatelevize.cz/ivysilani/10161678681-motocyklove-zavody/211471296210012/ This match had Mseno (Jaros, Pouznar, Sitera, Hancock, Holub, M Hadek and Vaculik) against Pardubice (Suchanek, Barker, A Dryml, Zetterstrom, Milik, D Hadek and Petrak)

Emil is no longer under 21, so wouldn't have been able to replace Vaculik. Emil instead of Nicki might have been a good shout, though. Assuming Sully does fill the number 5 jacket, I don't think Crump would have added much more than him, if anything. Sully is about as good as they get around the Motoarena and tops Torun's home averages this season with a 10+ average.

It doesn't look like Czech TV have anything scheduled for the Saturday, but they are again covering part of the Gold Helmet on the Sunday live. Coverage is from 13:50 until 15:25 BST. If I recall from previous years, you have been able to watch directly on the Czech TV site, so that should hopefully make a useful appetizer for the play-off finals in Poland which start at 16:00 BST.

Unless I have missed something, Sky don't own Virgin. Sky bought Virgin Media TV last year, but that was just a set of TV channels which Virgin Media owned, not the core business of Virgin Media.

Zielona Gora have a decent home advantage and often rack up some big wins at home. They defeated Leszno by 19 points when they met in the regular season. Was that the Leszno meeting that you were referring to? It certainly wasn't great for racing. The earlier match was the better of the two. Highlight of the day had to be heat 12 in Gorzow:

I don't think it's ruining your late viewing of the meeting to say that, no, they weren't very good. TVP have the meeting available to watch on their site, but sadly only seems to be what they showed live. I thought they would include the first few races