Humphrey Appleby

Much the same with many sportspersons, even in the rarefied world of the EPL or whatever. They make it in their chosen sport because they're talented and usually dedicated at doing that, not because they're good at business. And only a handful of people in any given professional sport make serious money, and even if you can make a fairly good living wage, you'll usually only have a short time in which you're doing that. There's also the issue that successful sportspersons will usually have always been successful from a young age, will invariably have people blowing smoke up their ar**s, and will often have others sorting their lives out for them. So they don't have perspective that the money isn't always going to be coming in, and they're not necessarily going to be successful at anything else they do. Plus it makes them vulnerable to hangers-on and those trying to rip them off. We've been doing some work for one of the major rugby bodies, so I've got to know some of the former professional players. This is a relatively mainstream sport where the players are generally better educated than most, yet it's shocking how far so many fall when their playing days are finished. But they way they're treated when become surplus to requirements, simply dumped and suddenly losing their entire support network, is actually also appalling. And of course speedway is even further down the food chain in terms of money, prestige and public image where some benefactor is willing to help you out with some work.

Of course it is. Even high profile athletes got away with it for years.

I couldn't care less if people take soft drugs recreationally. Plenty do, and I suspect if you conducted a random test of the whole UK population, you'd find a high percentage who do indulge in it and function perfectly well in their jobs. So not sure why people expect speedway riders to be any different. Of course, it's different to be under the influence if you're actually riding - the same as alcohol - although the likes of cannabis hangs around in the body long after it's had any deleterious effect. It sounds like Garrity doing harder stuff though, which is a different matter.

There wasn't anything like the competition from foreign leagues in those days, nor the Speedway Grand Prix that required complicated travel schedules. The Daily Mirror Tournament, was I think a one-off as well.

I think very few countries could put out competitive test match teams, which would require anywhere from 6 to 8 riders. It would essentially preclude countries (e.g. Australia and the US) where it's impractical for them to stage home matches, whilst riding matches at neutral venues would probably be a financial disaster. As it stands, people have already pointed out the flaws of the Best Pairs format where your team is only riding once every 3 heats or so during a meeting. There might be a case for a handful of countries to stage a separate Test Championship linking bi-lateral home and away matches/series together over a season or even longer. But when you'd find time in an already crowded calendar is another matter.

No doubt, but it's the trade-off between scoring points and making money in the here-and-now, and the possibility of scoring more points and more money in the future. All I can say is that I'm glad I didn't choose speedway rider as my career...

Didn't he also have an idea to put a chicane in the bends...

Problem is that Gate 4 can sometimes be the best gate on certain tracks and in certain conditions!

Rider averages will never be an accurate reflection of true ability because - at least in Britain - each riding position meets the opposition riders a different number of times and under different circumstances. Reserves in particular tend to have easier races in comparison to heat leaders, and the No. 2 position in the classic heat formula generally had easier opposition than the rest of the top 5, although the downside was that Heat 8 was always the obvious place to do a (double) tactical substitution. But as with cricket, there's all sorts of factors such as when you're put into bat or expected to bowl. Case in point is Freddie Flintoff who's batting and bowling averages were never exceptional by classic all-rounder standards, yet every team in the world would have been happy for him to play for them.

Usual story of football teams living beyond their means and then losing tenure or title of their own ground, thereby leaving them at the mercy of property developers. Beyond foolish as the ground is often their only tangible asset, but since when did football and sense go together?

Can't think it would be that difficult to come up with a compromise format with 3+1 rider teams. Or run the Pairs event on Day 1, with a proper World Cup on Day 2.

In most World Cup type tournaments, the finalists have usually not competed against all the other teams earlier in the tournament, and have often not met themselves until the Final. It's therefore not possible to say they've met the strongest teams, regardless of their early results. In the standard Best Pairs format, every team will have already ridden against every team before reaching the Final - in fact twice in the SON. It's therefore a bit farcical to decide the result on the basis of a contrived scoring system after 43 previous heats. You could have still have a Final, but give the team scoring more points in the earlier rounds the advantage of a point or something.

Best Pairs competitions by their nature are not well suited to knockout or winner-takes-all formats. There's, what, a one-third chance in each heat of each team scoring the same number of points unless you have a contrived scoring system, so you can really only go on accumulated points over a number of heats. Ultimately it's a flawed format for a major (televised) team competition.

There's never been the money to make the SGP a full-time circus, nor probably enough tracks able and willing to host the number of rounds necessary to make it full time circus. You'd probably need to be running every week from April to September, which is 26 rounds or so (although some of those could be the SoN). I think you'd end-up with spectator fatigue seeing the same few riders week after week, even putting aside the issues that you'd ruin the Polish leagues.

Simple matter of economics. Poland gets better crowds and presumably commands better sponsorship than the SGP.

Depends on the rules of the national championships. If you're a dual-national or dual-licence, then why shouldn't be able to ride in both? Might even be a requirement of holding a particular licence.

I doubt it's all paid up front. Assuming that the FIM still remains responsible for paying the prize money though, even if they quadrupled it, I still don't think it would match what GP riders can command in Poland.

Not really. The SGP doesn't pay anything like a living wage to the riders, whereas the Polish leagues do. It's the FIM and BSI who've been wagging the dog for years, effectively getting top flight performers at cut prices.

Double headers might work at some tracks, but could equally be both a racing and financial disaster so not sure you'd want to do it every race weekend. And of course, surely it would start eating into the Polish League programme? If they're going to have a 2-day event, would prefer the field was expanded to 24 or even 32 riders and they run some sort of qualifying event on the Saturday. Or run a GP Challenge on the Saturday (like F2 or F3) for different prospective GP riders, with a couple of places in the main event for the most successful of those. However, I suspect for the same reason that the field was cut from 24 to 16 riders, there isn't the money to bring more riders to each event.

So they can't do anything online in the meantime, including refunding payments that were probably made online? Utterly pathetic excuse. Are you ordered to say this stuff, or do you actually believe the crap you're fed?

Getting Philippe to do the GP programmes...

So would be about 3-4 times more per year than what IMG-BSI were paying, although the Eurosport deal covers multiple disciplines not just track racing, right?

Many of them grew up as Afghan refugees in Pakistan. Not 100% sure about Kenya, but think most of them were native too, whilst Namibia was a South Africa territory until 1990, so many Namibian players would essentially have had South African connections.

Is that $100K or $1m? And is that per year? If it's $100K per year, that's significantly below what BSI were paying. Even if it's $1 million per year, that's probably less than half than what the FIM was getting previously.

Has it actually been announced how much the deal is worth? The IMG/BSI deal wasn't worth massive bucks in the grand scheme of things. Caveat emptor. If Discovery/Eurosport haven't done due diligence then more fool them, but I'd find that highly unlikely given how long they've been in the sports broadcasting business. Of course, any new deal is going to be accompanied by a load of publicity hype from both parties, but I suspect both understand the actual realities.