PolskiZuzel

Is there anyone who could help me in finding results of the Stal Gorzow team visiting British tracks in 1965 ?

Polish speedway club finances are based on four legs. - writes sportowefakty.pl - 30 percent are receipts from tickets, 20% comes from the local government, 25% from TV broadcasters and another 25 % from sponsors. At the moment, it looks like each of these legs is in a bad way. Many speedway sponsors are transport companies that are already in trouble. In a moment they will be looking how to save their businesses, and not dealing with sponsorships. Local governments will also have more important problems than sport. The Speedway Extraleague, which pays each club an average of 2.5 million PLN (£500 000.00) from the television and sponsorship deals, can not be sure that it will be able to do so. Television has paid for all matches, the sponsor has expectations for exposure. If the conditions will not be fullfiled, renegotiation and reduction of funds will occur - says Mr Kryjom, former speedway manager, on sportowefakty.pl If it would be possible to start in May or June (according to the forecasts of health experts this second scenario is possible), then there will be no big tragedy. - As a last resort, we can extend the season and go in October or even November - says Mr Jerzy Kanclarz, president of Polonia Bydgoszcz . Worse, if it ends as Robert Dowhan, a shareholder of Zielona Góra predicts, who believes that we can slowly get ready for a year without speedway. - It could be the death for our sport - assesses Mr Kanclerz, on sportowefakty.pl because then the domino effect will work. Clubs will suddenly lose almost all influence. Sponsors and local governments can even ask for a refund of money already paid. If clubs lose, players will lose. In this situation, many of them will pray that they do not have to return part of the amount already paid as part of signed contracts.

To be honest with you, I am getting bored with all these investigations into corruption. My answer to your question (whether things are better now) is - I don't know. And when it comes to corruption in speedway... I have not heard of any.

With all due respect... What the reports on corruption at large, and perhaps more than 10 years ago in football , have to do with speedway in Poland?? Where do you see connection?

You are giving report that is eight years old. We are talking about now, the presence.

It is interesting to see attendence figures compared with stadium capacity. Here they are compiled by sportowefakty.pl. Club Stadium capacity Home matches Total attendance in numbers Average attendance Average attendance in % LUBLIN 9’812 7 68’684 9’812 100 WROCLAW 14’000 9 115’499 12’833 91.67 GRUDZIADZ 8’000 7 48’000 6’857 85.71 CZESTOCHOWA 16’850 9 124’500 13’833 82.10 ZIELONA GORA 15’000 9 110’000 12’222 81.48 GORZOW 15’000 7 70’750 10’107 67.27 LESZNO 16’700 9 100’760 11’196 67.04 TORUN 15’500 7 53’936 7’705 49.71 The undisputed winner of this ranking is Lublin. All home matches in Lublin were sold to the last place. Some said - half jokingly, half seriously - that if Lublin’s stadium had 20,000 seats, fans, even then would buy all available tickets. In the case of Częstochowa there is an interesting situation, because in the attendance ranking they came first with an average of 13,833 fans per meeting. However, after taking into account the total capacity of their stadium Częstochowa are no longer the leader. Finally, the lack of supporters at Torun’s Motoarena illustrates well the relationship between sports results and attendance at the stands.

To have attendances you must have funds to contract good riders. You won't have attendences if your team is losing match after match. To have a successful team you need riders who will deliver that, and such riders (if available) cost money.

If anyone of you was is still in doubt who is really financing Polish speedwayspeedway in Poland, here is the answer as “revealed” by the Polish website: po-bandzie.com.pl. Are you surprised? Polish speedway is kept by the local governments. It is the taxpayers' money that makes it possible for construction of new stadiums or renovation of outdated ones. They give the opportunity to contract foreign and national stars . Without television coverage, Polish speedway would run with miserable public interest. Without state-owned companies, it would be much poorer, it would persist in pain and torment as a natural curiosity, but without money from local government it would fall on its face. Truly, I tell you that without local government money there would be no Motoarena in Toruń or Łódź. It would be impossible to modernize the stadiums in Gorzów, Wrocław, Częstochowa, Zielona Góra and Grudziądz. Nobody would even bother about building a new facility in Lublin. Any plans to refresh the infrastructure in Gniezno and Tarnów would probably have to be postponed for many years. Stadiums are just one side of the coin, the other is money allocated for the promotion of the city by the club and the team. In this way, millions of subsidies affect the account of clubs in Częstochowa, Wrocław and Lublin. All Polish clubs get more or less money. If not in live cash, then they are exempt from fees for using the stadium and their necessary repairs. More money from local government means extraliga possibilities. Smaller funds are enough for first or second league. Let's take Częstochowa as an example. The city mayor and the city council lamented about the huge debt, but more than three millions were found. In this way, residents of Częstochowa are paying pay four foreign riders from Danmark, Sweden, Australia, and Norway plus a young man from Toruń for a good result. All this so that the speedway team from Czestochowa would fight for the Polish team championship and the people of Częstochowa had a reason to be proud. Anyway, things are similar in Wrocław. Taxpayers sponsor two Englishmen, an Australian, a Russian and a young man from Częstochowa. In Grudziądz, the strenght of the local speedway club is one hundred percent dependent on money from local government. Grudziadz’s mayor has more to say than the club's boss . Without the support of the town hall Rudziadz team would not even have the right to dream of an extraliga. Taxpayers' money, are spent on speedway, which can only boast six months of competition in a year, and on its own stadium the club can stage only seven league matches. For all kinds of speedway and leage-maniacs, that's quite normal. For everyone else it's quite abnormal. Speedway in Poland has long been an element of local politics. Due to the great interest of fans, city presidents and councillors have become virtual slaves to the speedway tradition. They can't afford to disregard speedway fans, because they will lose election. And although local government debts are growing at an alarming rate, to make potential voters happy, millions for speedway must be found. Meanwhile, education is suffering, health care is dying, and more loans are bursting annual budgets. Local government officials, however, must take into account that citizens will eventually get fed up with long quees at the hospital waiting room, and the expenses for professional sports will start to bother them. It is likely that local government officials will say stop and significantly reduce spending on spring-summer speedway. Then unprepared clubs will remain with a budget hole. Such scenario needs be taken seriously. Meanwhile, speedway is becoming increasingly dependent on city money. (…) Even in speedway cities, not everyone is mad about speedway. And not everyone is interested in spending money on foreign stars. Let everyone answer the question, whether taxes’ money should constitute one third of the professional speedway club budget, consisting of seven players, usually four foreigners. I have the impression that in the end, local politicians will have to answer the title question, who prefers speedway and who efficient health service?

STATEMENT by Maksym Drabik's club - Sparta WROCLAW WTS Sparta Wrocław declares that it is aware of the explanatory proceedings conducted by POLADA against Maksym Drabik. However, we emphasize that no unauthorized substances have been detected in the rider’s body. POLADA did not suspend the competitor, it only asked for additional explanations in connection with the competitor's statement made during the doping control about taking substances hydrating the body a few days before the competition. This action was coordinated by a club doctor and was dictated by the state of health of the speedway rider. We declare full cooperation with POLADA in order to complete the proceedings as soon as possible. The club will not refer to media speculations or comment on matters until the investigation is completed.

Drabik has 14 days to explain his conduct. The first hearing will probably be held in mid-February. It remains an open question what consequences his Wrocław club, PGE Ekstraliga and FIM will have for him. Drabik was tested on September 22, almost two weeks before the final of the individual junior world championship final in Pardubice, which ended in his triumph. It is quite probable that if he is disqualified, the 22-year-old will have to give up his gold medal from this event.

An Interesting article published in today's Polish daily sports newspaper "Przeglad Sportowy" Bartosz Zmarzlik’s , individual speedway World Champion's, victory in Poland's "Sports Personality" plebiscite made the Polish general public aware what the speedway fans had known for a long time. Interest in speedway in Poland breaks records and even football, due to its availability considered as No. 1 sport, cannot be equal in this respect. Polish LOTTO Football Ekstraklasa beats Poland’s PGE Speedway Ekstraliga only in one respect - the amount of money invested in it, but this gap can soon be heavily bridged. Next year's tender for the right to show the "best speedway league in the world" promises to be exciting. Eurosport has already announced its participation in it, Canal + and Eleven Sports will certainly be interested, and there are many indications that TVP, the National Public Broadcaster under social pressure will also wake up in time. In 2018, Canal + and Eleven Sports shared the rights to broadcast PGE Ekstraliga. In total, they paid 60 million PLN (£12 million) for a three-year contract (until the end of the 2021 season). For speedway it was an astronomical amount, almost three times higher than the previous contract. In comparison with football, however, they are "pennies".The rights to the Polish football EkstraKlasa, positioned (in terms of sports level (!)) at 31st place in the world , were sold for a similar period for PLN 440 million! (£88 million). They paid this amount for a two-year contract for the seasons 2019-2020 and 2020-2021. The television money lined up for football have little to do with fans interest in Polish football from the stands or on TV. Poles do not watch it more eagerly than speedway. The average attendance at the Football LOTTO Ekstraklasa is 8,800 spectators, and at the Speedway PGE Ekstraliga over 10,800, and this is only because the stadiums in Lublin and Grudziądz are too small for the needs of the local fans. If more fans could be allowed in, then the average would increase even more. Football matches shown on the coded Canal + channel in the 2018-2019 season were followed by 105,000 fans. Speedway matches in 2019 on the same channel had an audience of 165,450 spectators. Footballers were saved only by publicly available channels, which speedway can only dream of. Therefore, our speedway promotors should be focusing all their energy in the coming months to make the public broadcaster interested in speedway. Matches of PGE Ekstraliga in the most accessible channel in the country would certainly gather over one million viewers in front of TV sets. This would take speedway to a completely different level. Then, nobody would even try to compare our sport with camel races.

Krzysztof Cegielski, and great majority of speedway followers in Poland are strongly against this idea. Below is what he had to say on the subject in SportoweFakty.pl (...) I would like to remind anyone that strong and rich speedway leagues in Poland did not come from the fact that one or the other club chairman, riderr or anyone else came up with the idea of building the best speedway league in the world. We achieved this position thanks to the successes of the Polish riders. It was the successes of Tomasz Gollob supported by Jarek Hampel in the GP and the entire team in the World Cups that caused the interest of big sponsors, television stations and the media. Some time ago we had to pay for television channels to show speedway on our screens. Today TV channels are fighting among themselves for it. That is why we must watch our team and introduce our own younger talented riders to it. We would not have had them, were it not for the provision for two young Polish riders at no. 6, 7 (or 14,15) Today there would be no Drabik, Smektała, Kubera, Lampart or the entire backbone of our National team. If today we forcibly throw foreign juniors into the Polish speedway at the expense of Wojdyła, Szlauderbach, Bartkowiak or Świdnicki, then we will close the natural access of more riders to ou rNational Squad..

British fans who follow Polish speedway must be aware that In many respects, the realities in Polish speedway are somehow different from those in the UK. And as already explained by others, Polish clubs are not necessarily supported by the paying public alone. It is also wrong to compare admission cost in Polish speedway to that in the UK. For a start an average income of "a working" man in PL is not even nearer of that in the UK. If it was there would not be so many of them in your country.

They don't have to be :-) The thing is that clubs, as such, can only pay so much to individual riders, but on top of that there are individual sponsors (arranged by each club) who pay whatever they feel is appropriate and acceptable to each rider. This system can create problems as some riders experienced. Apparantly Russian rider Kulakov, the top rider from the Polish First Division, is moving from Tarnow to Torun because Tarnow is lagging behind with paying him sponsor money.

Why do you believe what SpportoweFakty writes. They are nothing more than tabloid publication interested in whipping up atmosphere around given event. What exactly was wrong with Wroclaw track? Can you supply any evidence of incorrerectess. Why Kolodziej, Sayfutdinov and Drabik were able to score handsomely and world champion and Grand Prix winners could not. And yet they all rode on the same track.

""very" seems to be understatement...on top of that Magic cannot win a race...disaster!"

I also agree with what you've said.

I have never sugested of anyone being "completely stupid" :-)

This topic gets on my nerve...because people on here do not seem to realise what Polish people earn on average. According to statistics average wage in PL is $13'079 and in the UK $55'054. Having this in mind now you can compare speedway entry prices in PL and UK. Will you still say "no wonder they get such a big crows", or will you think again.

That's a good question...most of Polish fans thinks so...and would like to crucify him for this. I' wondering, the same way as they think it was as you, whether it was such ofense

In Polish speedway there are no "reserves". Instead at nr. 6 & 7 there are riders U-21...and Kubera + Smektala fit that bill.

All that you've said above... I agree with...but I would add one more thing. People in Poland flock to the stands not so much because they are concerned about speedway as much as they're concerned about themselves and their image among their own countrymen. They want to portray themselves as being superior to those in other speedway towns. If they would love speedway they would attend in thousands any speedway event. As it is they do it only for the League competition.

If you believe in Polish press then Rybnik hve nothing to do with Bewley appearance . According to Rybnik manager, Mr. Zyto, Bewley needs to change his behaviour. He did not appear on Friday's official practice. He had not been seen on Rybnik's track neither on Saturday. He was suppose to practice together with Troy Batchelor, but the Australian admitted that he felt tired after an intense week in the UK and gace up practicing in Rybnik, the track he got to know very well. Bewley was not even present at the Rybnik fixture with Lodz, he flew from Wroclaw to the UK where he rides on Monday Premiership meeting.

If you have super fast engine there is no need to rely on gating