Kevin Meynell

Many of the problems in the sport is caused by trying to keep the riders happy, rather than what's good for the sport. It's all very well riders claiming they have to ride in four leagues or whatever to make it pay, but it's ultimately undermining the whole structure. Ideally, it would be better if the main leagues (Britain, Poland, Sweden and Denmark) could come to some sort of agreement to coordinate their competitions, so that there wasn't the issue of fixture clashes and rider burn-out. However, the major leagues seem to think they can go it alone, and are essentially in competition with one another (even though there's no reason why they should be). Therefore, the BEL must either decide to do what's best for itself, or ultimately slowly go out of business. You work out what British speedway can afford (and sustain) and then make the riders an appropriate offer which they can take or leave. If you don't get enough riders wanting to ride in your league full-time, then you need to consider making it semi-professional or whatever. I realise this sounds rather brutal, but I'm afraid that British speedway really needs to take control of its future. It still offers fairly good money and a lot of meetings, and if Polish teams can ban their riders from competing abroad, then I don't see why British speedway shouldn't be thinking along the same lines.

Whether they 'should' and whether they 'can' are different things I think. I think that British speedway be less tolerant of intinerant riders, or at least only employ those who are willing to limit their commitments elsewhere. The question is whether riders can make a living by solely riding in Britain, or perhaps one other league as well. If they can't, then perhaps we need to consider moving to a part-time set-up, because the current arrangements are pretty unworkable. I don't see that the SGP and the British League are compatible, especially if the SGP moves to more rounds (although we shall have to wait and see if this happens). The fact is though, that riders certainly can't make a living from the SGP at the moment, so they'd have to make a choice in accordance with who pays their wages. Yes, but I believe this is a key issue for speedway's future success. The current merry-go-round makes it difficult to build-up fan interest and loyalty in teams, which in turn affects their viability. It's a fine balance as a degree of team equalisation is also desirable to maintain fan interest, but at the moment, you really might as well draw riders out of a hat at the start of the season.

Yes, there obviously has to be some sort of longish-term idea behind the changes, but I think it's pointless to have targets for (say) the numbers of tracks in 10 years.

Whilst we know how short-term thinking has damaged the sport, the reality is that most tracks undoubtedly struggle from season-to-season. They cannot afford to think about what will happen in 5 or 10 years because they might not even last through the following season. I have to say that I'm not a great fan of long-term strategic approaches, as I'm more a here-and-now person. I'd start with making incremental changes that are unlikely to have an adverse effect in the short-term, but which have the chance of improving things over a longer period.

I think the main question to be asked is whether itinerant riders should have a future in British speedway. In other words, should be continue to employ riders who have multiple commitments in multiple countries, or should we attempt to have a more self-contained league? The most obvious manifestation is whether British speedway should try to co-exist with the SGP, but equally riders having many employers has been problematic. Of course, a loss of 'overseas' riders would mean a reduction in the supposed quality of British speedway, and the need to develop and promote more home-grown (by which I don't necessarily mean British) riders. However, I think this British speedway really must break from this mentality as this commitment to employing the "world's best riders" regardless of the long-term consequences will eventually doom the sport here. How much longer will fans tolerate matches between sides cobbled together from whoever could be bothered to turn-up that particular week. It would be much better to have stable line-ups, even if this means supposedly 'lower' quality. In any case, new stars would eventually be born. The second question is how to devise a sensible team equalisation system. Most people agree this is desirable, but any system should allow a degree of medium-to-long term planning, and should not be so punitive as to penalise middle-of-the-table teams. The principle of the points limit isn't a bad one, but the current system been misused over the years and does nothing to encourage team building from one's own resources.

Iceland has no armed forces whatsoever and completely relies on NATO for its defence. I think none of the Baltic states have an air force and contract the Luftwaffe to patrol their airspace. Does anyone argue they're not legitimate sovereign states? He does now, but he didn't have a legitimate heir for a long time. Because the law was changed in 2002, in response to the succession 'crisis'. I'd agree that Monaco is more-or-less a vassal state of France, but this arrangement is by no means without precedent in the world. However, whilst it was reasonable to call the (former) San Marino GP a second Italian GP, the Monaco GP has a long independent history and was an initiative of Monegasques.

Most microstates have agreements with their neighbours for defence and external relations. In the case of Monaco, France has long sought to annex it, and forced it to sign a treaty that stated Monaco would become part of France if the ruling prince died without an heir. Until recently, the inability of Prince Albert to produce a male heir would have meant the end of Monaco as a sovereign state upon his death. However, Monaco changed the law to thwart the French by allowing females to accede to the title. So I think Monaco would quite like to be independent.

Not in San Marino, but staged on behalf of San Marino.

Does it? I assume you're referring to the Monaco GP which is in fact in the sovereign state of Monaco?

I think, although I could be wrong, that the general FIM rules don't allow a country to stage more than one GP as a 'national' GP. The 'European' and 'Scandinavian' tags are therefore to get around the issue of having two GPs in the same country. AFAIK, it's the same in road racing (also run under FIM auspices) as well, which is why only one of their three GPs is officially the Spanish GP, and the others are the Catalonian and Valencian GPs respectively.

We've also been riding speedway longer than any other nation, bar Australia. I think the question to be asked is how many world titles (team and individual) have we won in the past 20 years, and I count about three.

I think he meant the Middle East where there isn't a culture of watching live sport. The Far East though is a different story. If speedway was going to stage 'expansion' GPs outside its traditional markets, I think the Asia-Pacific region is where I'd start.

I'm not just saying this because I'm disinterested in the SGP, but I genuinely think expanding beyond 6-8 rounds devalues the product. Having supposedly the top 16 riders in the world meeting a handful of times at major venues, would create more interest than having 4 or 5 poorly-attended events tacked-on for the sake of it.

Maybe a Middle East would be worth a punt if a suitable mug, errr... I mean promoter could be found to take the gamble. However, I suspect such a GP would be little more than a shoe-in as a televised round as the local population is notoriously disinterested in watching sport live, probably because it's too damn hot. Furthermore, I doubt the extreme heat would be conducive to the sport unless an indoor stadium could be found. The dust is bad enough on Good Fridays at Oxford, so goodness knows what it would be like in Dubai! But why would expats be interested in speedway anymore than they are when they're living in London or wherever? Rugby and golf are supported because they have wider interest back home. I think I'd try expanding in the Asia-Pacific region first.

Well, it would be a boring forum otherwise. Bydgoszcz compared with Katowice, Målilla and Eskilstuna compared with Ullevi, Lonigo compared with errr.. Lonigo.

F1 is a slightly different kettle of fish because you can only watch the F1 drivers in that series (although it wasn't always the case). It's also self-sustaining, and has the patronage, largely for historical reasons, of the great and the good. By contrast, league speedway is held in several countries on a regular basis, and indeed provides the bulk of the earnings of the SGP riders. In fact, without the professional leagues, it's fair to say there probably wouldn't be a SGP. In the SGP can become the main source of riders' income, or self-sustaining, then fair enough. Otherwise there needs to be a happy balance between the SGP and leagues who pay the wages. I wouldn't disagree that the SGP has given us a glimpse of how things might be better, but I don't think it's been massively innovative. It really only looks good because the rest of speedway is so bad. I don't think I said it wouldn't last. I said that it was unlikely to become a full-time series, or expand as much as people were claiming. Several years later, I think I've been proved correct as we still have an entirely European-based SGP that relies on 'borrowing' riders from other competitions, an SGP that still largely takes place in small stadiums in obscure places, and a reversion to a 16-rider competition using a 70-year-old format. Speedway is already a minor sport, akin to ski-jumping and other sports that are popular in a select number of countries. Eurosport fodder I call it . I hope so, but time will tell... I remember similar hype when BSI took over the SGP, but did they really take the sport to another level? IMG has been on a vast spending spree recently, acquiring all sorts of weird and wonderful things. I hope they know what they're doing, but all sorts of companies often start losing their way when their founders relinquish control (or die, as was the case with Mark McCormack).

Sometimes less is actually more, and expansion is not always good for a sport. Speedway has about three 'big' markets, and maybe three or four others where it's followed to any extent, and that's it. Just where are all these extra rounds going to be held? Okay, maybe Australia could hold a round, and possibly the US at a push, but I can't really see anywhere else in Europe where a GP is going to be a success in the long-term. In other words, if the SGP is to expand significantly, some countries are going to need to stage several rounds which will very much reduce the appeak of the existing GPs. Really? The only round that draws in spectators in huge (for speedway) numbers is the 'showcase' GP at Cardiff (with the suspiciously round figure of 40,000). The rounds at Wroclaw and Copenhagen are reasonably well attended (at 24,000 and 24,892 respectively), and the one at Bydgoszcz (17,000) is acceptable. However, every other round was sub-10,000, with Lonigo only drawing 4,500 (again a suspiciously round figure). Even the last World Finals managed to better these figures, and frankly the attendances at most of the pre-BSI SGP rounds probably weren't any worse either. Therefore, where is the evidence that more people are actually watching in person? Okay, you can reasonably argue that the SGP has exposed the sport to more television viewers, but how many of them actually then go their local tracks? It doesn't really matter how many people watch if the revenue generated never finds it's way to the tracks who produce and provide most of the GP riders with a living. An expansion of the SGP is only likely to cause even more problems for the national leagues, but the upside is that it might start bringing-it into conflict with the powerful Polish League. Riders might eschew Britain, but I'm sure they'll be reluctant to give-up the rich pickings to be had in Poland. Sport is full of bankrupted 'rights holders' who over-expanded into sports they didn't understand. ISL (former holders of the FIFA World Cup rights) is the most classic example, but there are others. I imagine IMG has bought into the SGP to provide cheap television programming for their Trans-World Sport programs, and we can expect speedway to take it's place in the schedules alongside prestigious sports such as mountain biking and triathlon.

It's actually not such a bad idea, but I think anything that doesn't allow substitution of out-of-form riders is doomed to failure. Any system that contrives to give a programmed rider an artificial (dis)advantage still relies on the losing team to have in-form riders programmed in the heat in question. If several team members are struggling, it doesn't really matter what you do.

I don't think this is actually such a bad idea, but I'd restrict it to the non-heat leaders. Again, I think this would be better than the current bonus point. I'd award (say) 5 points for a 10 or more point win (or whatever the TR/TS differential is), 4 points for a less than 10 point win, 2 points for a draw, 1 point for a loss by less than 10, and 0 points for a loss by 10 or more.

They were, and prior to that, teams used to have choice of gate positions when 6 points down... plus ca change etc..

I never understand this obsession with expansion when speedway is doing so badly in its core markets. Why not try to attract more people in places where the sport already operates, rather than chase nebulous markets in regions where sport in general isn't of much interest to the locals?

Yes, but teams rarely used their best riders in that position. Although you'd have thought it would be a tactical advantage, teams seemed reluctant to do it. In any case, you could discourage teams from doing this by making the rules so that the reserves were not allowed to take as many rides as the other riders.

That crash was in the old World Team Cup back in 1989, and ended-up Gundersen's career. All four riders in the first heat (Erik Gundersen, Lance King, Simon Cross and Jimmy Nilsen) were injured in a first bend pile-up and unable to continue. They were replaced by reserves for the rest of the meeting. The 'old' WTC format was 4 riders per team + a non-programmed reserve that could be used at any time. There weren't any tactical options. The five riders per race format is quite a recent 'innovation', although the old World Pairs Championship did run with six-rider races from 1986-1990.

Yes, but why the restrictions of the use of the reserve now. Why not simply let them replace any rider at any time, subject to a maximum number of rides?

The figures are suspiciously round, so I suspect were even lower than claimed. The reason... well I think the novelty of the SGP has started to wear-off. Too many rounds, too little variety, and a foregone conclusion as to the outcome.