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Adding Speedway to my list of formerly dismissed but now favourite sports

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English: Speedwayriders riding in start number...

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)

When I was a kid I saw brief news updates in the sports section. When they were done talking about the traditional sports: football, cricket and so on, they had a few seconds dedicated to speedway, and I thought: yeah ok they ride motorbikes in circles on dirt and slide them, big deal. The only team I heard about was the Poole Pirates. I ended up watching them live at Eastbourne a couple of weeks ago. I’ll get to that in a sec.

 

As it turns out, that was a bit hasty of a conclusion to make. Eurosport, one of the only channels I watch, recently acquired the rights to the Speedway Grand Prix series. So I thought why not give it a go and see what it’s all about. I’m really glad I did. Speedway GP is an elite level competition featuring the best riders in the world, and they compete against each other individually. Almost all other Speedway competitions are team based, where you have 2 guys from each team in each heat and therefore tactics can come into play. Because of the lack of tactics, you get what are probably the best Speedway races in the world and it’s fantastic to watch.

Rather than go into detail about the rules and how it works, which you can find out easily yourself, I want to just talk about how fantastic it is as a spectacle. It’s fast, loud, exciting, is a great spectator motorsport because you can see the whole track from any location around it and it’s easy to understand what’s happening.

Watching a couple of Grands Prix on TV got me hooked, and when we got the chance to go and watch a live meeting with the team I’ve heard about as a kid against the most local team to me, I jumped at the chance. It was cool that we got to go and see the same guys I saw on TV up close roaring past me at 60 or 70 mph only a couple of metres away. The sound of the engines roaring and popping was intense, I got a bit of shale in my eye once or twice, and every lap they went past I exhaled methanol but who cares. It was awesome.

On TV you just don’t get the sense of what it’s like up close. The rumbling of the engines as they rev on the start line and the amount of speed that they go past you on the front straight with before they slide into the corner with no brakes is addictive.

If you have Eurosport or better yet, if you’re within reasonable distance of a local team, either here in the UK or elsewhere I urge you to go and check it out. You might get drawn in as I’ve been.

 

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Why I was wrong about Aggressive Skating

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When I was a kid, I had a pair of cheap aggressive skates. I never really tried to get good, and even though I could keep my balance OK, I never learned to do any tricks. Instead, simply dismissing the sport as too easy because the wheels are strapped to your feet, like snowboarding and unlike skateboarding.

Watching vert skating especially looked to me at the time like cheating. It was so easy to do I thought. Looking back now and watching the sport, you realise that the things which I and many kids unfortunately seen as making the sport easy, actually give the sport its uniqueness among extreme sports. Few other sports in this genre allow you to use your whole body to emphasise tricks. Some of the grabs you’ll see from vert skaters are some of the most spectacular and stylish you’ll see. The extensions of the grabs, combined with the speed and therefore height that the skaters achieve is something amazing to watch.

Equally, spinning tricks are obviously easier to control as the skates are attached to your feet, but this just offers more room for experimentation and style. In the same way snowboarders can do incredibly complex and stylish rotations on axis skateboarders can’t achieve, the same is true here. The speed and angles of some of the spins are extraordinary. Watch the Yasutoko brothers, Takeshi and Eito and you’ll see what I mean.

Put simply, skateboarding, like BMX are more technical sports, while aggressive skating has more of a natural flow and freedom to it when done well. I like all of these sports and essentially all extreme sports to some extent, but the simplicity and style of aggressive skating makes it stand out. If you’re lucky enough to live somewhere with a lot of smooth surfaces and nice grind spots, then you can have a great deal of fun. Plus, it’s a lot less daunting to newcomers. If you fall on a trick, you’ve got no big bike to get tangled up in and even though you can’t bail out if you get it wrong, it’s easier to start smaller on skates than you can with a board due to it’s less technical nature.

With all this said, I think when you consider the progression the sport has seen in the last few years, as well as the fact that with more TV presence, what more could be done. I definitely think that ESPN should strongly consider reinstating inline back into the X-Games. It’s one of the founding extreme sports and I think it deserves its place back on the biggest stage. Progression of tricks would go through the roof if the sport was given a second chance.