Bavarian

That's what the Italians had printed in their programme. It is most probably Craig Pendlebury.

There is some mystery concerning this unofficial international speedway test match between ITALY and an ENGLAND Select, held at Castelmassa in Italy, on Sunday, September 9, 1979. The teams as listed in the programme are: Italy: Mauro Ferraccioli, Luigi Bazan, Charlie Brown (=Guiseppe Marzotto), Paolo Noro, Gianni Brizzolari, and Mario Andriolo. England: John Davis, Neil Collins, Mike Farrell, Nicky Allott, Eric Broadbelt, and Reg Pendlebury. This was not a British club team, as the six "English" riders (Farrell was actually Australian) came from five different club teams. Maybe someone can help with some background Infos to this match, and provide the result, and the individual point scorers ?

Why is that ?

Nothing that couldn't be overcome. Where there's a will, there's always a way. I have absolutely nothing against Belle Vue, I think it is a nice little stadium with a fantastic speedway track. Of course, they could stage a Grand Prix there, but I believe that a bigger stadium like Bradford (Odsal), now that it will have a permanent speedway track again, would be the better option. EUROSPORT/DISCOVERY as the new SGP/SoN rights owner from 2022 have already stated that they want to take the SGP to new places. Wouldn't You think that Bradford's Odsal Stadium would be very tempting for them?

The point is that Bradford (Odsal) will be the biggest Stadium in the UK that already has a speedway track.

no speedway tracks there

Odsal would be the only speedway stadium in England that is big enough to host a SGP, while unfortunately the Belle Vue National Stadium in Manchester isn't.

There are some great pictures of the new Odsal Stadium speedway track in this week's Speedway Star. Even if no league team is based there initially, could this magnifivent venue be used for Special Meetings, such as an English SGP perhaps, when Discovery takes over the running of the SGP series from IMG/BSI in 2022 ?

The Russian SGP at Togliatti in August may not happen due to the WADA sanctions imposed on Russia for 2021 and 2022.

I may be a dreamer, but I want Scotland to do all they can to get their own national team in Speedway once more. I know they don't have enough home grown riders at the moment, but then they must start to find and train them, or get them from elsewhere (Australia?) with Scottish ancestors. Remember what Jacky Charlton did to find players for the Irish National Football Team many years ago. It worked very well ! England and Scotland should both have their own teams again, and only on special occasions (such as the Speedway of Nations), they should and would merge into a "Team GB" (like other sports do for the Olympics). It is that tribal Thing that I miss in modern days speedway. I want Speedway to experience that same spirit of national pride and passion to get behind YOUR team, like the Scots experience every time their national Rugby Union side plays at Murrayfield. In Speedway such emotion is only found in Poland nowadays. Why not here and in all the other nations ?

@ racers and royals sadly You are probably right, it might never happen, since nobody seems to care. All the Promoters and clubs do care about are their own interests. But the International game should have absolute priority over any Club or Individual meetings. In most of our sports the national team is usually the biggest showcase to present the sport to the general sporting pulic, who take not much interest in a particular club or individual riders. But if it is their own country that is represented, they can easily identify and get behind it. The Poles pay their top riders to ride in rather meaningless friendly Internationals each year, against Russia, Denmark, Australia or the Rest of the World in recent years. Thats better than nothing, and even these meetings get supported by sponsor and tv stations and make money. If these meetings had some more meaning, being part of a major international tournament, it would make it all much more interesting. To get things off the ground in the UK, the British team (or rather England) should engage with old enemies Australia in a proper test series and compete for a special trophy, be it "The Ashes" "or someting like a "Calcutta Cup" that England and Scotland play for in Rugby Union. Give the thing a name that catches on with the public and give it some media build up. The two "tests" in Western Australia, which Woffy helped to arrange early last year, were a start. This could and should become much bigger, though. Give it a go !

Australia could be based in the UK and run their home meetings over here (maybe at Poole? )

The annual Rugby Six Nations tournament kicks-off today. Why oh why can't we have something similar in our sport ??? We now don't even have a Speedway World Cup anymore, just that rather low-key "Speedway of Nations" pairs competition. Unfortunately the FIM does nothing to highlight the team aspect of speedway - which is actually what makes our sport so great and so very different from all the other motorsports. Therefore it is time for the biggest speedway nations to take it into their own hands and organise an international team tournament featuring the five major speedway nations. Team vs team racing, with six-man sides, in a round-robin tournament with two home and two away meetings. This must not be held each year, but only every other year, or four years. Poland, Denmark, Australia, Sweden, and Great Britain should be the permanent big five members. Maybe The Rest of the World could feature with a combined side as a sixth team in the tournament, to include the minor nations' top riders. Anyway, the national teams in speedway desperately need some kind of an international tournament. Currently we only have the SoN, and possibly one or two friendly internationals, like the Poles have each year. This is not enough and fails to capture the imagiantion of the sporting public, when there is no major tournament to look forward to. So if the FIM does not let us have a World Cup, there should at least be something else, such as a Five (or Six) Nations Cup speedway tournament. I guess that the fans, the riders, sponsors and TV stations in Poland, Denmark, Sweden, Australia and the UK would not vote againt this.

I wonder who was that ?

http://www.fim-live.com/en/article/fim-speedway-u21-calendar-update/ Just read that the FIM has changed the format of the U21 Junior World Team Championship, which is replaced by the U21 Junior Speedway of Nations this year. It will be the same format as the senior SoN with seven pairs' teams of two riders, plus one reserve, instead of the previous four-team meetings. There are no qualifying rounds or semi-finals scheduled for 2021, only the final to be held in Poland on September 24, 2021.

We hope so, too, but with dual nationality he might be tempted, since the Polish clubs are head-hunting for talented juniors. His parents come from Bydgoszcz, a town formerly known as Bromberg, before it became Polish in 1945.

Germany's top teenage speedway rider of 2021 is certainly the seventeen year old Norick Blödorn (MSC Brokstedt). By the way, Norick is the nephew of the former international speedway rider and world long-track champion Tommy Dunker. Here in Bavaria we also have a promising seventeen year old speedway rider in Erik Bachhuber (MSC Olching). Probably our hottest speedway prospect here in Bavaria since Martin Smolinski is a fourteen year old youngster by the name of Patrick Hyjek (born 28 May 2007). He has Polish-German parents (they originally come from Bydgoszcz), lives in Munich, and rides for the MSC Olching. Hyjek twice won the German 125cc speedway title in 2018 and 2019, was fourth in the FIM 125cc Gold Trophy. He switched to the 250cc class last year and was again nearly unbeatable, but due to the Corona virus there were no official championships held last year.

When the Russians introduced the sport to Mongolia in the 1960s it worked very well and became quite popular in the capital City of Ulan Bator. National meetings were run there for more than twenty years. China was a different story. No official race meeting was ever staged there. In the 2000s the Blagoveshchensk club attempted to take the sport of ice speedway racing across the border into northern China. This was not really succeesful, even though the Chinese authorities allowed the Russian club's ice speedway riders to do some demonstration runs at a couple of ice race tracks at Heihe and at Harbin in northeastern China. For a demo in the Manchurian capital city of Harbin, they had even brought the top two Swedish riders Posa Serenius and Stefan Svensson. But it seems that the demo runs did not sufficiently impress the responsible people in China to get the sport started in their country. In February of 2014 the Chinese authorities were invited to attend the Ice Speedway Grand Prix across the border at Blagoveshchensk, and Armando Castagna was already talking about the possibility of an Ice Speedway Grand Prix in China within a couple of years (2016). https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&u=https://www.speedweek.com/eisspeedwaygp/news/52165/China-Interesse-an-Eisspeedway-GP-2016.html I wonder if the F.I.M. had given the Chinese and Mongolian ventures some more backing, it may have succeded and we could now have three Central Asian ice speedway nations, in Kazakhstan, Mongolia, and China. .

The Mongolian ice speedway racers are an interesting topic. The Russians had introduced the ice speedway sport to Mongolia sometime in the mid-1960s. They were racing in the Grand Sports Stadium in the capital City of Ulan Bator for about 20 years. With the end of the communist era, the ice speedway racing ceased in Mongolia. They had problems to get bikes and equipment. There seems to have been an attempt to rekindle the enthusiam around the year 2000. A couple of Mongols rode in the 1999/2000 World Championship qualifying round at Berlin-Hohenschönhausen, a one-day meeting over twenty heats, held on December 17, 1999. The two Mongolian riders were Sereener Myagsuren, who scored five points and finnished tenth, and Basuren Battsengel, who scored four points and finished thirteenth. Another Mongolian rider competed in the following year's world championship in a qualifying round at Yekaterinburg in Russia. That was a guy by the name of B. Khadbaator. Over the two days of racing he scored only three points and finished last out of the sixteen riders in this meeting. That was the last time the world has seen an Mongolian ice speedway rider. But let's take a look at the Mongolian riders' international performances of the 1960s and '70s: Back in 1966, the inaugural year of the F.I.M. Ice Racing World Championship, a couple of Mongols rode in the semi-final Meeting at Novosibirsk, but failed to qualify for the finals. There names were Sambu Lam and Mirgom Tusvin. In 1967, a Mongolian rider by the name of Salbu Seszbudee made his first appearance in the world championship, finishing thirteenth with 8 points over two days of racing in the semi-final round held at Novosibirsk. This was the meeting were New Zealand's Ivan Mauger finished sixteenth with just a coule of points over the two days of racing. Another New Zealander, Goog Allen, scored nine points and thus finished just one ahead of the Mongolian. In 1968 the first Mongolian qualified for the world final. Two of them contested the semi-final at Sterlitamak in Russia, and it was Salbu Serszbudee who qualified with seventeen points (9+8) over the two days of racing, finished in seventh place, with the top eight going forward to the world final at Ufa. The other Monglian in this meering was Sadambagin Oschirsuch, who did not make the cut, finishing eleventh with ten points. The 1968 World Final at Ufa was held over four days of racing and won by Gab Kadyrov. The Mongolian Salbu Serszbudee finished very credible twelfth with a total of 15 points. For some reason unknown to me Serszbudee was not riding in the 1969 World Championship rounds. The Monglian riders in the semi-final round in Moscow were Dasdors Damdisuren (12th place with fifteen points) and Tuvsin Serengin (15th place with five points). Salbu Serszbudee was back in 1970, and indeed finished among the top eight in the semi-final round Held at Ufa. Seventh place with sixteen points quaified him for the world final, while the second Mongol in this meeting Dasdors Damdisuren was eliminated in fifteenth place with only four points. The fact that the 1970 world final was the first one held outside of Russia, at Nässjö in Sweden, may have proved problematic for the Mongolian, who did not make the long journey and forfeited his place, thus missing the chance to ride in his second world final. In 1971, when the world final for the first time was held at Inzell in Germany, the two Mongolians did not progress from their semi-final round in Moscow. Salbu Serszbudee narrowly missing the cut in ninth place with eighteen points, and Dasdors Damdisuren finishing twelfth with thirteen points. The Mongolians had only one rider in the semi-final rounds of 1972, when the world final was again Held at Nässjö in Sweden. Salbu Serszbudee rode in the semi-final at Ufa in Russia, scoring ten points, finishing eleventh and thus failing to progress to the final. Again, Mongolia received just one place in the 1973 World Championship qualifying rounds. A new rider, Sokol Handmaa rode in the semi-final at Ufa but failed to impress. with just five points from his ten rides over the two day meeting, he eded up in fourteenth place. Dasdors Damdisuren re-appeared an represented Mongolia in the world Championship semifinal of 1974 at Ufa in the USSR. Disappointingly this rather experienced rider could score just three points over two days of racing, ending up in fifteenth place overall. 1975 saw the international debut of an other up-and-coming Young hopeful, who would become one of the leading riders in Monglia during the late 1970s and the 1980s, and who would make an unlikely comeback on the world stage in 1999. That was Basuren Battsengel. He rode in the 1975 world semi-final at Laningrad, but got no more than three points, which gave him the thirteenth place in the overall standings. In 1976 the two qualifying rounds were both in Western Europe in Berlin (Germany) and Grenoble (France). This may have been too far away to travel for the Mongols, so they withdrew and were not seen again in the F.I.M. Ice Racing World Championship until their all-too-short-lived comeback in 1999/2000/2001. I feel it is a shame that the F.I.M. has done absolutely nothing to help a nation like Mongolia to continue with the sport.

Of the East German speedway riders, Thomas Diehr was the one I remember, who took up Ice racing in the early 1990s, and was quite good at it. The bearded one came a few years later, that was Marian Kreklau, but he was not so good.

yes

Russians with a Belarus license, others had a Polish (the Ivanovs) or German (Nikulin) license. Afaik there was no ice racing in Belarus.

Mine has arrived on time (Friday mornings) here in Bavaria in the last couple of weeks again, after a few delays over the Christmas/New Year period. No complaints here!

Does Poland really need (want) Chugunov in their national team? Chugunov should remain loyal to the Russian national team, just like Emil and Artem do, who also have Polish and Russian passports, but stay on the Russian side. But it is up to him to decide where belongs to.

Scotland v England 1981 National League Test Match at Powderhall Stadium, Edinburgh