Humphrey Appleby

Yes, but many speedway fans also used to go to football as well, and there's a significant overlap in the seasons. Football was quite a cheap sport until the 1990s, and speedway prices tended to be lower still from memory. It probably shouldn't be discounted that as football prices have skyrocketed, that the casual fan could only pick one sport to follow. I remember paying GBP 3.50 in 1988 to watch top-flight speedway, which the inflation calculator puts somewhere between GBP 7.38 and GBP 12.26 today. I recall that GBP 3.50 was about my hourly wage at the time, whilst the average hourly wage today is somewhere around 14 quid, so even discounting the fact that I'd have been earning below the average wage as a part-time student employee, it suggests speedway admission has significantly increased beyond the rate of inflation. I agree that a speedway admission to average earnings ratio doesn't entirely tell the whole story, because many commodities are now cheaper in real terms so the average person has more disposal income after they their living expenses are taken into account. Equally though, you have to factor in things like the fuel to get to meetings which likely has increased beyond inflation. The fact of the matter was that even as a student, I could afford to watch both football and speedway on a regular basis. I'd doubt that would be possible today.

Newspapers are mostly dying a slow death anyway, and are not medium for attracting a new younger audience.

As others have said, speedway isn't as popular in Poland as often claimed, but Poles are also working to make money not spend it.

No, but no-one's interested in the other ones and neither do they feature all the top players in the world. I'm not sure anyone would buy a speedway franchise, but just pick the four teams that are likely to get best crowds and have stadiums you're not embarrassed to bring new people to. Run 20-heat meetings with both a team event and knockout individual competition to provide a proper night out and give exposure to both types of format, and then go from there. Either run a 4TT over 8 rounds (2 per track) or 4 team home and away round robin (6 matches per team) with a Grand Final. All BEL teams contribute to the running costs, and share any profits (minus host track expenses).

A short format super league like the IPL or BBL with a handful of teams might be worth trying, although finding a suitable slot with all the GPs, SWC and SEC rounds would be a challenge. I think it has to be team event though, otherwise you're just replicating the SGP or SEC and not promoting interest in the wider team sport. I'm also not sure I can think of 4 decent speedway stadiums in Britain nowadays.

Happy Faces? There seemed to be a strange fascination with American South in 1970s Britain - souped-up motors, horns playing Dixie, the Confederate flag and people shouting 'yee haw'. I'm sure this even pre-dated the Dukes of Hazzard being on television. I'm sure most people would have been totally unaware of the connotations with slavery and Jim Crow, but equally I never quite saw what the Confederacy had to do with British culture and speedway teams - then or now. Teams should be named after nice British birds - like robins...

They were all riding in Britain when I was going in the 1980s, and crowds were on a downward trend there. I also seem to remember pretty well all the top riders riding in the newly established Elite League in 1997 until the early 2000s, and again there were declining audiences with the odd exception. There's part of the reason, but also associated with admission becoming too expensive. There are of course a whole host of reasons for this, not just related to rider wages, but those seem to have risen beyond what the crowds justify and have contributed to the downward spiral. Well Nicki Pedersen was riding in the EL for several years, and crowds still declined. People might cross the road to watch these riders occasionally, but the novelty wears off if you're paying 18 quid a week. That's quite aside from not knowing whether they'll turn-up for the team, even if you did arrange the fixtures on one or two race days.

Barry Hearn generally involves himself in sports with low overheads and little in the way of existing effective organisation. He can then pretty much run the whole thing himself the way he wants. Football and speedway come with too much baggage by comparison. You deserve what value you bring to your employer. And he was right. I wouldn't invest in speedway unless I could run the league (at least the top league) as a single entity. They might say they want to see the top riders, but they're not prepared to pay for it. That's been proven down the years by falling crowds even when all the top riders rode in Britain. British speedway should absolutely not be bending over backwards to fit its schedules around riders that the average member of the public has never heard of, and who they can't afford anyway. It should be run on days when the paying public is most likely to turn up, with riders committed to race in every meeting. It needs to rebuild from a lower base, paying more sensible wages, putting on more heats and entertainment, and try to make the stadiums look half respectable.

Yes, but the prices charged for mostly very average accommodation in Cardiff are totally obscene. Supply an demand are all very well, but even BSI seem to have recognised that it's deterring people from attending the GP. It's probably deterring non-speedway people from going to Cardiff as well. Eventually you kill the golden goose if you gouge people too much.

I think you're reading far more in this than what I actually said. The fact of matter though, is that any prospective promoter needs to know the commercial rights are on offer in the first place, or have the contacts to lobby for them. I've never seen these sorts of things advertised. Of course impropriety had happened in other sports of which there's plenty of evidence.

Not really any big enough venues to do it properly, and the one that is is likely too expensive to make it viable for a one off or series of events. It would perhaps be better to tack on a club meeting before or after the British GP, but there would be issues of the track holding up and of course there would need to be cooperation between the organisers. I don't really see it as a solution though. It's the day-to-day product that needs to be improved without having to pay 25 quid for it.

When you do anything in Russia, you need 'official' blessing otherwise travel visas get mysteriously delayed, equipment gets held up in customs or worse disappears completely, and if you manage to get your money than consider that a bonus. If the powers-that-be want something to happen then nothing is a problem, if not then expect every obstacle to be put in your way, including various threats if you don't get the message. Basically someone needs to be paid off, and prospective promoters need to decide whether that's worth their while or not. Plus local promoters get bumped off as well, which was possibly a bit discouraging for BSI.

I'm not interested enough in speedway these days and I already run an amateur motor sports series anyway. I'm also not close enough to the speedway powers-that-be to 'arrange' the rights because they don't seem to be tendered. It's not about not running showcase events, but about who runs them. The likes of the FIFA World Cup, Olympics, IPL and BBL are run by the governing bodies of those sports, are coordinated with existing competitions, and the benefits accrue to them. Darts and snooker are not really comparable as they were games without any particularly established competition or governance structure until third parties came along looking for cheap televise content, and also don't exist as spectator sports beyond the very small professional circuits. Then why does Barry Hearn not promote speedway which should be ripe for his promotional skills? The simple fact of the matter is he cherry picked sports with low overheads, with few professionals who earned virtually nothing, and where there was little established competition structure that needed supporting, and what did exist was amateur. Yes, he's been very successful at what he's done, but would it work with speedway? Probably not which is why he's not gone there.

If Britain ran four meetings a year then it could also get all the top riders. I doubt there would be many professional riders though if there was only the SGP and SEC. Last time I looked, the prize money for the SEC was worse than for the SGP which itself isn't great. Maybe some of the riders are getting ex-gratia payments as well, but the average rider is not going to have much change once their running costs are taken into account. There's good reasons why events don't go to Russia. OneSport are also just going to regular speedway stadia, which is fine, but it's not that hard to put together a troupe of riders and get agreements with four speedway tracks for them to ride at. It's already been mentioned on here how much lower the inscription fees are for FIM Europe events, SEC doesn't run at any one-off venues like the Millennium or Friends Arena with the attendant costs of that, and quite possibly the host tracks are carrying the financial risk too. So really what money are OneSport putting where the mouths are? You're comparing apples and oranges. Speedway is a minor league sport in Britain that Sky uses as cheaper filler on the quieter days of the week, and one with an unappealing demographic for sponsors and advertisers. Whilst the popularity of speedway in Poland is much exaggerated, it is a popular regional sport with much better crowds and is therefore able to get much better deals. Having said that though, they seem to squander the money anyway as the lamentable state of Polish league finances demonstrates. No-one would hold up Britain as a shining example of how to promote speedway, but it's a quite a different thing to put on 200-300 weekly speedway meetings at all levels than to run 4 with cherry picked riders. And for better or worse, British speedway has been running for nearly 90 years, whereas OneSport have been around for how long?

I don't think so, but each to their own.

I wasn't talking about whether people were using licensed or unlicensed travel agents (or tour operators), but the method of booking. However, I suspect any trend back towards using high street travel agents/tour operators is because most of the really bad ones have gone and the others are working harder for the business. With respect to the scare stories about unlicensed travel agents and/or those run outside of the UK, it's reasonably easy to check their credentials and if you pay by credit card then that provides protection anyway, plus wise people have insurance too. In 20 years of being a very frequent traveller, I've been affected once when an airline went bust, but I also saved a fortune over the years by being able to shop around on the Internet. Travel agencies were and quite possibly remain one of the biggest rackets going - mostly incredibly lazy and colluding with favoured operators which customers usually didn't realise until the advent of the Internet. And unless you're prepared to do hundreds of thousands of pounds of business with them, they make very little effort to do anything more than you can do yourself and often for a higher price. Airlines and hotels selling direct is one of the best things that ever happened to the industry. Yes, I'd agree there's still some place for tour operators because they can still leverage bulk deals and put together competitive packages. I'm not totally adverse to using them in some circumstances, but if I can't book it on the Internet then it doesn't get my business and I suspect that's the case for the majority these days.

No-one would hold up GoSpeed as example of great promotion, but what is OneSport doing that's so great? Running meetings largely at 'traditional' venues, borrowing the riders, and claiming that BSI is some sort of evil British plot to take over speedway. What is the SEC, SGP and all other privately promoted events actually doing for the sport? Are they bringing more fans, sponsorship or television money to the tracks who employ the riders day-to-day or train the riders in the first place, whether directly or indirectly? What is the overall benefit to the sport, other than it gives armchair speedway fans something to watch? These private promotion companies are skimming the cream without having to have any responsibility for the underlying structure of the sport.

Not sure why all the traditional travel agents are going the way of the Dodo then. My actual point though, was not that people don't want to book all-inclusive holidays, but the method by which they do it.

Because women's sport with few exceptions (e.g. tennis and the odd high-profile football match) is hardly watched by anyone anywhere. I looked up attendances for women's basketball in Poland, and even the biggest crowds ever have only been a few thousand with absolute record standing at 12,000 which was several thousand more than the next highest gate. And in case anyone suggests it, that 12,000 gate did not coincide with a Polish GP...

I'm not excusing the FIM's behaviour. There's something inherently not right about selling the rights for something like 18 years at a time apparently without doing any sort of open tendering, but equally allowing a subsidiary/associated organisation to run a similar competition which will potentially compete with the SGP. Less of an issue if it's a completely different type of competition like the World Pairs or Club Champions Cup type thing, but OneSport and BSI are just Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee. I simply can't see that it's a good thing that the sport's governing body is selling off competitions to private promoters here, there and everywhere. If money is to be made, it should be made by those running speedway tracks who provide the bread-and-butter and develop the riders. It demonstrates the collective short-sightedness of those running speedway tracks in all countries, but especially the countries running professional speedway, that they allow this state of affairs to continue seemingly without any murmur of discontent. BSI and OneSport do nothing that the sport itself couldn't do if the will were there, as did the F1 teams when they eventually worked out their sport wasn't being run for their benefit.

If you download it before you go out then it's on your tablet/phone whether there's any reception or not... I thought it was quite an interesting read and wish him better luck, although you have to wonder why otherwise successful businesspeople would take on such a risky business venture without good backing. We do need entrepreneurs and I know it's easy to be wise after the fact, but speedway is such a bad investment at the best of times that it should only be done if you have the money to lose. It sums up for me, the current demographic of speedway. Who books travel by filling in paper forms these days...? I prefer to travel independently anyway, but if it can't be done over the Internet, it doesn't get my business.

The online version is actually more reliable. No postman to worry about and can pick it up anywhere in the world.

I'm well aware of that. In fact, I've long dispelled the myth that speedway is the most popular sport in Poland when quite clearly football and basketball are the No. 1 and 2 sports in popular interest. However, it's a bit of stretch to blame poor attendance at a speedway GP on a women's basketball tournament

Speedway isn't F1 and never has been, but F1 actually has engineering teams that were either acquired or sponsored. Virtually all current F1 teams have a long lineage in the sport. Well I rarely defend BSI, but I can quite understand why they got miffed after buying the rights to the SGP and SWC for 21 years, only to have a renegade branch of the FIM sell the rights to another GP series and team event that potentially competes for television and sponsorship.

It's what speedway fans do... The issue was it masquerading as something it wasn't. If OneSport just ran it as the invitational international best pairs or something then no-one would grumble.