Cardiff 2022

[IainB]

16 hours ago, SPEEDY69 said:

To get 80k there must have been some serious promotion - but again Wembley is not in the best of areas, a bit like the NSS.  Now Tottenham stadium I was impressed with when I went there to see GnR. 

I also went to see GnR, lovely stadium... bugger to get to!

[SPEEDY69]

11 minutes ago, iainb said:

I also went to see GnR, lovely stadium... bugger to get to!

Oh we drove and parked 10 minutes walk away. Plenty of food choices on the walk in and home in and hour and a half as it was right near the main road. 

[Fromafar]

The only reason I would go to a GP is to see the best riders in the World giving their all on decent track.That doesn’t happen at Cardiff.
Let’s be honest it’s a ritual and a social week end for the majority of the GB fans.The spectacle on TV doesn’t do the sport any favours when the track is so poor.

[IainB]

14 hours ago, longmeadow said:

No we are not going to tottenham or the o2 as they are premier league clubs who do not want there ground digging up for a one off motorcycle event.

The pitches are not dug up but pallets are laid onto the pitch and the track is built on that

14 hours ago, auntie doris said:

There was a great pass near the end when the water tractor overtook the grading tractor. In the Star today" expecting riders to perform to the best of their abilities on that track was like asking the Bake Off finalists to produce a cake without any flour or sugar."A large number of big stones were found on the surface.

That doesn't appear to be an option here: https://twitter.com/SpeedwayGP/status/1560212561844441088

14 hours ago, customhouseregular said:

How many GP venues used since 1995 have a roof?. How many WF venues had a roof?. How many World Championship events over the decades were staged in stadia with a roof? Too much emphasis is placed on having a stadium with a roof. Just my opinion of course.

From memory: Cardiff, Norway, Warsaw and the one in Germany that was called off

13 hours ago, Humphrey Appleby said:

Neither is the London Olympic Stadium in the best of areas. Quite aside from the cost of renting a stadium (reputedly 500-750k per day + 10% of gate receipts + costs) that would never be filled, it would be a squeeze to get a track in without substantial and expensive modifications. 

It's also why there's never been an athletics event held there. 

It has great transport links and there's quite a big shopping mall adjacent to the site... and there's also the Olympic Park

"It's also why there's never been an athletics event held there." erm... the 2012 Olympics and:

Although West Ham United are the primary tenants, the stadium's operators arrange many other events to take place there.

Athletics[edit]

Anniversary Games[edit]

 

David Weir broke the World Record in the men's T54 mile

On 24 January 2013, it was confirmed that the London Athletics Grand Prix, a Diamond League event, would be switched to the stadium.^[187] In February 2013, it was announced that it would also hold a Paralympic athletics event on 28 July.^[188] In April Sainsbury's were announced as sponsors and the event was renamed the "Anniversary Games".^[189][190] At the event, David Weir set a world record for the T54 mile.^[191]

The London Grand Prix was scheduled to move permanently to the stadium in 2016. However, due to the 2015 Rugby World Cup taking place in the stadium, using the original seating configuration, the opportunity came to move the Grand Prix to the stadium a year early, again under the name of the Anniversary Games.^{[192][193][194][195][196]} During the 2015 events national records were set by Dafne Schippers (100 m), Dina Asher-Smith (100 m),^[197] Shara Proctor (long jump),^[198] while Georgina Hermitage (400 m T37) and Sophie Hahn (100 m T38) set world records.^[199]

The Muller Anniversary Games, the fourth-anniversary event, took place in the stadium on 22–23 July 2016. The IPC Grand Prix events were incorporated alongside Diamond League events on the second day of the meet.^[200] At the event, Kendra Harrison broke the women's 100 m hurdles world record, a time which has existed for 28 years.^[201]

The 2017 Muller Anniversary Games was shortened to a one-day event on Sunday 9 July 2017.^[202] Its move to an earlier time of the month was due to the 2017 World Athletics Championships

The 2018 edition returned to a two-day event on its typical weekend of 21–22 July. Tom Bosworth set a world record in the 3000 metres walk.^[203] Kare Adenegan and Sophie Hahn set world record times in the T34 100 m and T38 200 m events.^[204] While Sifan Hassan set a Diamond League record in the women's mile.^[205]

The 2019 event was held on 20–21 July.

The 2020 event was scheduled to take place earlier on the 4–5 July. However, the event was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The 2021 event, scheduled to be reduced to a single day and take place on 13 July^[206] was not held at the stadium.^[207] No event was held in 2022 either.

After a three-year hiatus, the event would return to the London Stadium as a single day event on 23 July 2023.^[208]

2017 World Athletics and World Para Athletics Championships[edit]

London had bid to host the 2015 World Athletics Championships using the Olympic Stadium. It went up against Beijing's Olympic Stadium and the Polish city of Chorzów. However, the stadium had to withdraw its bid due to uncertainties arising out of the timing of the announcement of who would operate it after the Olympics, thus gifting Beijing the championships.^[209] With issues resolved over its future, London again used the stadium to bid for the 2017 World Athletics Championships.^[210] The bid was made official in August with Lord Coe personally submitting the bid a few weeks later at the 2011 World Athletic Championships in Daegu which was supported by London's Mayor Boris Johnson and the British Government.^[211] On 11 November 2011, the IAAF officially awarded the 2017 World Championships to London.^[212] The World Para Athletics Championships (formerly the IPC Athletics World Championships) were planned to take place a month before the able-bodied event^[213] and were formally confirmed for the stadium in December 2012.^[214] The 2017 able-bodied athletics event was the final track championship for Mo Farah^[215] and Usain Bolt.^[216]

The World Para Athletics Championships were held between 14 and 23 July 2017, with 800,000 tickets available across 16 sessions. The IAAF World Championships followed between 4–13 August 2017 with 700,000 tickets available. 3,300 athletes from 200 countries competed for 690 medals across 245 events.^[217]

2018 Athletics World Cup[edit]

In February 2018, London Stadium was announced as the venue for the inaugural Athletics World Cup. The event was held on 14 and 15 July.^[218]

8 minutes ago, SPEEDY69 said:

Oh we drove and parked 10 minutes walk away. Plenty of food choices on the walk in and home in and hour and a half as it was right near the main road. 

Yeah... didn't fancy roaming the streets as a lone traveller in an unfamiliar area late(ish) at night so opted to park out in the burbs and tube it in. Trains were on strike (again!) that day, wasn't sure I'd be out to get the last train anyway... nearest tube station was a 30 minute walk away... and GnR cut their set short by an hour. Not been a great year for big stadium events for me 

[HenryW]

19 minutes ago, iainb said:

From memory: Cardiff, Norway, Warsaw and the one in Germany that was called off

Parken in Copenhagen and Friends Arena in Stockholm also had roofs.

[IainB]

1 minute ago, HenryW said:

Parken in Copenhagen and Friends Arena in Stockholm also had roofs.

Of course... and I went to Parken twice, should have noticed the roof 

[Humphrey Appleby]

29 minutes ago, iainb said:

It has great transport links and there's quite a big shopping mall adjacent to the site... and there's also the Olympic Park

Wembley also has good transport links, and there's quite a few hotels, restaurants and bars on-site now, as well as several shopping malls nearby.

I admittedly haven't been for about 3 years, but the Olympic Park didn't have a lot in it from memory. And a fair bit of it was already looking unkempt and somewhat rundown. 

29 minutes ago, iainb said:

"It's also why there's never been an athletics event held there." erm... the 2012 Olympics and:

Although West Ham United are the primary tenants, the stadium's operators arrange many other events to take place there.

Erm, I was talking about Wembley. 

However, if a GP was to be held in London it wouldn't be at Wembley and far more likely to be in the Olympic Stadium. 

[IainB]

4 minutes ago, Humphrey Appleby said:

Wembley also has good transport links, and there's quite a few hotels, restaurants and bars on-site now, as well as several shopping malls nearby.

I admittedly haven't been for about 3 years, but the Olympic Park didn't have a lot in it from memory. And a fair bit of it was already looking unkempt and somewhat rundown. 

Erm, I was talking about Wembley. 

However, if a GP was to be held in London it wouldn't be at Wembley and far more likely to be in the Olympic Stadium. 

you could have said... I'm not a mind reader 

Let's face it there's not going to be a GP in London while they can't even get 20,000 in at Cardiff. The crowds have looked down at all the GP's over the last few years (with the exception of Warsaw), we've lost the big stadium Danish & Swedish events, the Polish ones aren't even playing to full houses and that was before Covid. I think the whole competition is in need of a revamp... are Discovery events the people to do it?

Edited August 19, 2022 by iainb

[Humphrey Appleby]

12 hours ago, R87 said:

Increasingly baffled as to why so many on here are so desperate to defend their precious Cardiff that they'll rubbish everything about Belle Vue  - 1 of the best things to happen to British Speedway in the last twenty years

Well if Cardiff is only pulling 19,000 then the British GP will soon have to be held at Belle Vue.

Belle Vue is decent for domestic meetings and even smaller international events, but it would be totally a backward step to move the premier event there whilst somewhere like Cardiff is still financially viable. I hold no candle for Cardiff which I don't think is especially convenient to reach and has appalling overpriced accommodation, but neither do I think moving the GP to a small venue in a less than salubrious suburb of Manchester is really where speedway wants to be going, no matter how good the track. 

I was quite critical of the former SGP promoters who didn't particularly move the series forward in 22 years, but I don't think trying to take some GPs to premier stadiums in city centre locations was really the wrong thing to be doing. In the case of the GPs it isn't just about the racing but the annual experience - plenty of World Finals had poor racing - and having experienced the charms of Pocking, it wouldn't attract me back for that sort of event. 

[IainB]

1 minute ago, Humphrey Appleby said:

I was quite critical of the former SGP promoters who didn't particularly move the series forward in 22 years, but I don't think trying to take some GPs to premier stadiums in city centre locations was really the wrong thing to be doing. In the case of the GPs it isn't just about the racing but the annual experience - plenty of World Finals had poor racing - and having experienced the charms of Pocking, it wouldn't attract me back for that sort of event. 

If you think the last lot didn't move the series forward... you must love the new lot!

[IainB]

20 hours ago, Humphrey Appleby said:

Visit Wales no longer seems to be listed as a sponsor

And they're not the only advertising signs that have gone missing. You look back over previous years and there were some pretty big name sponsors, global corporates, I seem to remember Fiat, Coca-Cola, Monster Energy. Look at what's there now: some dodgy bitcoin merchants, a dodgy tyre supplier and some polish haulage company.. Eddie Stobartski

The SGP series is currently at the lowest ebb it's ever been imo

[racers and royals]

1 minute ago, iainb said:

And they're not the only advertising signs that have gone missing. You look back over previous years and there were some pretty big name sponsors, global corporates, I seem to remember Fiat, Coca-Cola, Monster Energy. Look at what's there now: some dodgy bitcoin merchants, a dodgy tyre supplier and some polish haulage company.. Eddie Stobartski

The SGP series is currently at the lowest ebb it's ever been imo

Is that apart from DSE increasing the prize money considerably.  They have given  us continual individual pit shots of riders picking their nose and spitting 

[IainB]

Just now, racers and royals said:

Is that apart from DSE increasing the prize money considerably.  They have given  us continual individual pit shots of riders picking their nose and spitting 

Tbh, not sure what the prize money is, if that's true, has it improved the show?

For me the pit layout is about the only improvement DSE have made. At the end of the BSI/IMG era the riders were hidden away in their pit bays... It always used to give me a laugh watch Nicki Pedersen blow his nose into a paper towel and then run it through his hair 

[Humphrey Appleby]

8 minutes ago, iainb said:

Let's face it there's not going to be a GP in London while they can't even get 20,000 in at Cardiff. The crowds have looked down at all the GP's over the last few years (with the exception of Warsaw), we've lost the big stadium Danish & Swedish events, the Polish ones aren't even playing to full houses and that was before Covid. I think the whole competition is in need of a revamp... are Discovery events the people to do it?

I got the impression that IMG largely gave up on the SGP at some point, and just went through the motions to fulfil their necessary contractual obligations. They may have started out with some bigger ambitions at some point, but a combination of poor promotion, poor choice of location, declining interest in speedway in general, competing interests of the Polish Leagues in particular, exhausting the pool of local promoters willing to 'do a wedge', and other distractions (e.g. bidding to run the London Olympic Stadium that cost them a fortune) meant these ambitions could never be fulfilled. Having said that, the SGP organisers also seemed to be fairly amateurish in their approach, so maybe it was cause-and-effect.

Discovery is a much bigger organisation than IMG with far more money, so perhaps they can better speculate to accumulate for a while and/or leverage better sponsorship and media deals. However, apparently outsourcing the British GP to the former promoters and attracting the lowest crowds possibly ever doesn't seem like a great start.

I do think speedway is a hard sell for anyone though. It has a very limited geographical base, poor spectator demographics, gets limited mainstream media coverage, and has high overheads on top of that. 

 

[FAST GATER]

The roof if nothing else will make it hard to move the GP from Cardiff I would favour Odsal myself for number of reasons ,the  location is against it practical /track issues could be resolved if the powers that be were to  choose to do so .

Edited August 19, 2022 by FAST GATER

[SPEEDY69]

Odsal was a great venue but I think the roof is such a big ticket item in Cardiff's favour -  maybe a 100m track would fit into the Centre Court at Wimbledon 

[TINYS]

20 minutes ago, SPEEDY69 said:

Odsal was a great venue but I think the roof is such a big ticket item in Cardiff's favour -  maybe a 100m track would fit into the Centre Court at Wimbledon 

Better idea would be to get rid of all them tennis courts and build a track.

[Humphrey Appleby]

4 hours ago, FAST GATER said:

The roof if nothing else will make it hard to move the GP from Cardiff I would favour Odsal myself for number of reasons ,the  location is against it practical /track issues could be resolved if the powers that be were to  choose to do so .

Odsal got something like 17,000 for its last World Final, and I don't think it was even full (although close). The previous year, the Munich Olympic Stadium - whilst the track was rubbish - managed to pull 50-odd thousand, despite Germany not really being a major speedway nation. Cardiff even in its first year got something like 30-35k. 

I think the moral of the story is that small provincial stadiums just don't pull the crowds.

[customhouseregular]

5 hours ago, HenryW said:

Parken in Copenhagen and Friends Arena in Stockholm also had roofs.

So the vast majority of stadia were roofless, which validated my point.

[Humphrey Appleby]

21 minutes ago, customhouseregular said:

So the vast majority of stadia were roofless, which validated my point.

Well not really. The issue is GPs that have the expense of building temporary tracks. 

Since the SGP started, I count just 6 stadiums where temporary tracks were installed and there wasn't a roof. Berlin and Sydney were used once, and the Stockholm Olympic Stadium was used 3 times back in the early days.

The other stadiums were Gothenburg (9), Horsens (4) and Tampere (2) - none of which are still used. So a total of 20 GPs.

By my count, 7 roofed stadiums have been used - Cardiff (20), Warsaw (5), Stockholm Friends Arena (5), Copenhagen (12), Melbourne (3), Hamar (3) and Gelsenkirchen (2). So a total of 50 GPs.