It might not have escaped your notice, unless you have been on another planet, that we are having an Olympic year – an event that has not occurred in Britain for more than 60 years, since 1948.
And you may, or may not, know that the summer Olympics cover 26 sports with 36 disciplines and 302 events, from archery to Wushu.
Sorry to trouble you with such mind bending statistics when you are probably already suffering the effects of what can damply be described as an English summer as well as Olympic overkill.
What . . ? What the devil is Wushu?
Well, I’ll tell you.
Wushu is a ‘full contact sport derived from traditional Chinese martial arts.’ It’s in the list of Olympic approved sports. Which used to also contain polo and tug-of-war, but they were scrapped, and golf and rugby sevens are now proposed for inclusion in the next Olympics in Rio de Janeiro in 2016.
And, believe it or not, among the sports also recognized by the International Olympic Committee is motorcycling. The downside of that is that they don’t specify what kind of motorcycling. So. How about my sport – speedway racing? After all, speedway is a ‘full contact’ sport.
Speedway in the Olympics? You think I jest?
But why not?
It was while plundering the ancient dirt-track archives for some delectable morsel to see what we were up to during the last British Olympics that I came across a really fascinating prospect.
It was contained in the very first edition of a wonderful magazine called Speedway Echo (’16 pages – illustrated, 6d’) which was launched as a monthly ‘quality journal’ on March 23, 1948.
Olympic year 1948 was the year that speedway was unceremoniously turfed out of the Empire Stadium Wembley for most of the summer season to make way for the last Games and, I suppose, it was a hot subject at the time. The Olympics I mean, not speedway.
Those of you who were around in those days – like me – will recall that the illustrious Wembley Lions speedway team had to go all the way to South London to ride most of their fixtures. To Wimbledon, where they were hated so much that, on one infamous occasion, 1949 World Champion Tommy Price was threatened with an iron bar by some locals who had taken exception to the way he had ridden against their precious Dons.
Modern speedway fans are much more civilised, aren’t they? Such a thing couldn’t happen now, of course. Could it?
It may have been that Dons fans, outraged by the invasion of their Plough Lane citadel, were merely expressing their frustration because, in a report in the same issue of Speedway Echo it was pointed out that because the South London enclosure was miniscule compared with the massive Wembley, the arrangement would necessitate admission to Wembley fixtures by ticket-only, and the tickets would be issued only to regular cuckoo-in-the-nest Lions supporters – except for ‘a small number which will be reserved for the opposing team’s supporters’.
Hard to believe these days, I know, but the demand for space on the 25,000 capacity Wimbledon terraces was expected to be so great that, the magazine said, ‘it will be no good anyone turning up in the hope of seeing the racing by payment at the turnstiles’.
Wembley had won successive league championships in the two previous seasons plus various cup competitions, as well as having the 1946 British Champion in Mr Price. But, usurped from their traditional home in 1948 they had to play fourth fiddle to New Cross, Harringay and West Ham in the league.
It should be pointed out, though, that they lost skipper Bill Kitchen and international George Wilks to injury early on and had been given special dispensation to ship in the incomparable American Wilbur Lamoreaux to help out. Because a weak Wembley was unthinkable.
And Wilbur assisted them to snitch the National Trophy and the London Cup just to prove the Lions still had teeth, even though forced to ride nearly all their matches on foreign cinders. Oh, yes, and Wembley’s Split Waterman won the London riders Championship as well.
But we don’t want this to turn into a Wembley wake, do we? Right. So, back to this Olympic speedway business.
The author of the piece, Alan Page, marshalled his arguments in the following manner: what chance, he wanted to know, did England have of winning an Olympic ski-racing gold medal? ‘The number of people in this country able to afford a winter in Switzerland to get any experience in this thrilling pastime is exceedingly small,’ reasoned Mr Page.
Obviously he could have had no inkling that, far in the future, England would have not only affordable package deal skiing holidays to the land of the cuckoo clock, but also an Eddie The Eagle.
And, after all, went on our Mr Page, it had been the habit in the past of countries where the Games had taken place to include sports in which they specialised.
Hence, it was his irrefutable logic that speedway in Britain in 1948 was of far greater importance than, for example, ski-racing or ‘several other specialised events’.
QED. Or, if you’re Latin: Quod Erat Demonstrandum. Or then again, if you’re English: Which was to be proved!
He may have had a point, because in the 1948 season an official total of 10,000,000 (yes, ten million) people paid to see speedway racing at 28 league tracks in three divisions – an average of more than 10,000 a meeting.
But the real stumbling block for our stumbling reporter was that the Olympics are – or were – open solely to amateur competitors, and certainly, he conceded, the majority (of our leading speedway riders) were in the professional class.
Naturally, everyone who took part in the Olympic Games had to swear an oath that they were an amateur – and mean it . . . in those days they did, anyway.
No problem, insisted our intrepid Mr Page.
Though contemporarily out of the question, he theorized: ‘There is no reason why it should not become a definite proposition for the future . . . there are plenty of amateur (speedway riders) in the country and there is certainly scope for development in a direction which would gain recognition for it’.
Speedway as an Olympic sport, that is.
It was – and still is – a fact that soccer is not confined only to the big league professionals. The Football Association has control of thousands of amateur clubs, and there was absolutely no reason on earth, quoth our determined Mr Page, why a similar situation should not prevail in respect of speedway racing.
Well, our incorrigible Mr Page was nothing if not the eternal optimist. Maybe a visionary too. For, ask any modern National League speedway rider, or indeed some Premier and some Elite League stars, and they will tell you that they are – to all intents and purposes, anyway - amateur performers because they sure as hell don’t make money, let alone a living, out of the weekly matter of risking their necks for the sole purpose of public entertainment.
So, as we now have a brand new multi-billion pound Olympic Stadium (reportedly on the very site of the old Hackney speedway) together with an oval shaped athletics track, I’ve just given you the ammunition with which to lobby the International Olympic Committee for the inclusion of speedway racing in their next five-ringed circus.
One other thing I noticed, as I trawled the yellowing Echo pages, was an account, in an issue dated April 16, 1949, of how Harringay’s Vic Duggan had been along to Madame Tussaud’s waxworks in the Marylebone Road to unveil his own effigy.
They used to do that for speedway champions in those days. Tussaud’s had displayed waxwork figures of the 1938 World Champion Bluey Wilkinson and Wembley’s Tommy Price when he’d won the British Championship in 1946.
The report stated: ‘As Duggan took his place among the great personalities of the world, Tommy Price had to pay a visit to the melting pot.
’ Well, as the 18th century poet James Grainger observed: ‘What is fame? An empty bubble.’
John Chaplin spent forty years working on major national newspapers, including the Mirror and the Daily Mail. He was deputy editor of Mail International and is the author of five books. For more than fifty years he has been a writer and columnist on Speedway Star, the world’s leading Speedway magazine, and is the founder-editor of Vintage Speedway Magazine.