Humphrey Appleby

The asset system is an archaic nonsense in this day and age and should be abolished. If a rider is not under contract then they should be free to ride for whom ever they like, just as workers in every other industry are able to do. I can see the case for promotions genuinely developing young riders to get some compensation, but this should not apply indefinitely.

Bottom line is that not enough people are watching speedway to make it worth Sky's while. Whatever spin is put on it, raw viewing figures for the GPs would appear to be one-third to half of what they were a few years ago. If the SGP organisers have managed to alienate a GP sponsor to that extent, then there's surely something wrong...

So what's the problem with speedway then?

I'm guessing Terenzano is out of the series in 2014 then...

It's between 25.75 and 31.25 per month, depending on what basic television package you take. I don't think you'll get much change out of 50 quid per month, and I think you also have to take the Virgin phone line for that.

You might laugh, but didn't Ole suggest having chicanes or something similar in the bends a few years back...?

Yep, and the prices still went up this year. Sky Sports is no longer worthwhile if you're not interested in football, and there seem be free steams on the Internet where you can watch it anyway...

80 heats to be really fair, as everyone would then get the same gate five times. However, quite aside from being impractical to run that many heats, track conditions would likely be different throughout the meeting (or meetings). The 20-heat format is a compromise between practicality and fairness. Whilst you can unlucky in having a bad gate against a particular opponent, generally the best riders on the day score the most points. Plus, the current SGP format gives second (and third) chances to beat a rival in the knockout heats. The system isn't perfect, but it should be as fair insofar as possible. Far better than the previous knockout format where you could draw two bad gates and be out. The rules of the BTCC are known though, and teams plan their race strategies for each race/round accordingly. You can't factor in a totally random gate draw though (although the BTCC does randomly draw where the grid is reversed for some races).

Not all riders compete in all leagues, but even if they did, speedway has yet to establish an empirical ranking system to compare competitors.

In theory, but not in practice. National qualifying rounds have been hugely reduced or outright abolished over the years, so there are far fewer opportunities than there once were. With the limited number of places on offer at the end of the qualifying competition as well, I'd imagine a lot of riders simply don't bother entering nowadays.

In tennis there's a well-established and extensive circuit of events to determine which players are better than others and who should be seeded direct to the major tournaments. Speedway only really has the SGP, but that doesn't allow empirical comparisons to be made between riders inside and outside the series. I daresay that some sort of ranking system could be devised using averages established in the various league competitions and perhaps major open meetings as well, but it hasn't happened as yet. British players don't get all of the wildcard positions at Wimbledon, and I think may even be limited to half of the available quota. I think it's reasonable for tournament hosts to have some flexibility with respect to commercial considerations, but it's about proportionality. Only 8 wildcards are allowed into each Grand Slam (6.25% of the total entry), and I believe there are also restrictions on the number of wildcards a competitor can receive in any one season. By contrast, 25% of the SGP entry is nominated riders which are in addition to the wildcard rider at each SGP. I don't therefore think Wimbledon and the SGP are really comparable in this respect.

Depends on your definition of fairness. The SGP is a fairer system of determining the world champion, but not with respect to who gets to compete to be world champion. Yes, the old qualifying system had its anomalies and there were certainly seeded riders in the World Final in the past. However, most riders in any speedway country of any note had an opportunity to reach the World Final through a competitive process, unlike today where it largely seems to come down to commercial considerations. With respect to Richard Knight or Zoltan Adorjan being in World Finals... well yes theoretically they might have won them, but in practice it was pretty unlikely to happen. How many shock winners of the World Championship were there in 50-odd runnings under the one-off system?

A lot of committees are carried by the force of personality, regardless of how many votes that person has or hasn't got.

He does have some strange ideas. How on earth is it any fairer for a rider finishing top of the points to possibly get the worst gate of the night for a knockout heat? Olsen seems to want the SGP to be a lottery, whether it's his knockout format or random gate positions...

There's already a Junior World Championship that's struggling for riders, is it not? And surely a SGP qualifying competition as well? There's maybe no equivalence of the pairs at world championship level, so it could be seen as a second tier SWC, but a lot of the other competitions replicate what already exists at a world level (although in practice they're really only at European level too).

Does anyone know what the actual point of the European Championships are? The World Championships are dying on their a**es, and time is being spent on this distraction...

BSI is 100% owned by IMG's UK subsidiary, although technically through another shell company. Its staff are seemingly all employed by IMG, so for all practical purposes BSI and IMG are one and the same thing.

Huge swathes of the population in Poland and Sweden have any interest in speedway either. I've met precisely two Poles outside of speedway circles who know anything about speedway (and one of those was from Zielona Gora), so it's clearly a very regionalised sport in Poland. I suspect it's much the same in Sweden with little interest in the major cities and most of the support in provincial towns. Nevertheless, both the Poles and Swedes have managed to tap into this demographic and whilst not everything is rosy in their gardens either, they've not seen anything like the decline in Britain. Okay, so Sweden has a club based structure that helps, and plenty of undeveloped land in the middle of nowhere, but that's not the case in Poland and they're actually building new speedway stadia there. Since I've become involved in motor sport I've realised there are those who go out and knock on the right doors to make things happen, and those who just wring their hands whilst their clubs deteriorate around them. British speedway seems to fall into the latter category - from the administrators, to the promoters, to the specialist media.

Of course not, but neither do I see the SGP rejuvenating British speedway, or speedway anywhere for that matter. It simply has a tangential existence siphoning off what little money the sport is still able to generate, for the benefit of no-one but the BSI shareholders and possibly a few people at the FIM. I recognise and accept that IMG/BSI may have found additional money that the sport's 'guardians' had not exploited, but it's still money that someone was prepared to pay and some of which should be coming into the sport. In any case, an individual SGP circus will never be proper speedway to me, any more than the T20 Champions League is proper cricket (and I don't even mind T20 cricket per se). It's a sideshow to team racing, even if team racing is badly run and isn't doing so well these days. The leagues probably need to go back to basics, forget the 'stars' and run much more on a semi-professional basis on regular race nights with more variety. Use what little money there is to try to tidy-up the stadiums and offer better value for money (20 heat programmes with fewer gaps in the racing). Test cricket is actually doing quite well in England, and many would argue that the endless over-promotion of ODIs at the international level is what sucked the life out of domestic cricket. Yes, T20 was initially a success, but once again lessons aren't learned and that format is now being flogged to death in pointless bi-lateral series and the CLT20 nonsense which is run almost as farcically as speedway. Ironic that IMG were also involved with the discredited Lalit Modi and the BCCI who are behaving in exactly the same way as the SGP by scheduling the IPL and CLT20 without any consideration for anyone else. Fortunately, the ECB finally seem to have woken up to the dangers and realised they were ruining their own competitions by trying to bend over backwards to accommodate competitions they don't benefit from, and luckily whilst they're still rich enough to prevent their players being poached. However, even the BCCI thought paying 10% of the revenue to IMG was too much ("The BCCI working committee was of the view that the“amount which was asked by IMG was disproportionate to services rendered”), whilst the FIM seemingly happily allows them to take 80%+ and this goes unquestioned by just about everyone... BTW - I think the joker is a ridiculous rule, and even more so at SWC level. Tactical substitutes would be fine, and there's not even the argument that money needs to be saved in the SWC because the prize money is a fixed amount.

I think it's a questionable statement that the SGP is going from strength-to-strength, especially in light of the possible loss of a major television contract. I'd have also said that a competition taking 6, then 10, then 11, and now 12 prime race days (and that's not counting practice days and the SWC) was certainly not helpful to British speedway, although things are now at such a low ebb that it's really neither here-nor-there these days. Maybe true for Poland, but the ethnic population in Sweden is actually much the same as the UK percentage wise, and even if ethnic populations can't be interested in motor sport, there are still over 50 million Anglo-Saxon-Celts in the UK to draw upon. Swedish speedway somehow manages to make the sport a community affair, and of course probably gets more support from local authorities. Favourite riders being shipped off elsewhere also happened when the sport was popular, so that's not really a complete explanation. It could also be argued that without a points limit, the differences between the top and bottom would be even greater, and more teams would have bankrupted themselves to try to keep in touch. I'd agree that the team equalisation has just become ridiculously punitive over the past 20 years, and provides absolutely no incentive to develop riders or build for the future. Unfortunately though, continually stating 'the bleeding obvious' isn't ultimately isn't going to change anything, and those in influential positions could be proferring some possible solutions. Otherwise there won't be much of a sport in 5-10 years time, and where will the SGP be then?

Significant time and effort undoubtedly goes into the organisation of the SGP and SWC, but then you'd expect that from something that's a 10 million quid enterprise. You're also not really comparing like-with-like. BSI are running 13 events per year and have a significant number of paid staff to sort things out, whereas most domestic tracks will be running significantly more than that and largely relying on volunteers. No-one would suggest that the British speedway is run very well at all, but one can be sympathetic to the difficulties and problems that it faces (even if some are self-inflicted). You expect higher standards from an international media corporation, just as I would if I compared a World Cup Finals match to one in the Combined Counties League... From my perspective, IMG/BSI appear to do an okay job, but nothing very outstanding.

Will we able to watch it?

Well you're right with respect to the last part of the sentence...

350 metres isn't even a particularly long speedway track in some countries...

In fact returning to the format that was used in the late-1980s. The SWC is pretty much looking like the old WTC nowadays...