Wearing Dad's Overalls....by David Hensby

David Hensby responds to Chris Seaward's article that suggested that speedway was something of a mystery to young people.

Good article by Chris Seaward, I would very much agree with his thoughts regrding the awareness and popularity that speedway has in the eyes of the younger generation.

I remember growing up in Poole and I was taken to see speedway by my Father and later with my school mates. Despite the lack of money to even buy a speedway bike, I remember us all using our pedal bikes to race around and slide sideways in our front gardens! I even have the polariods to prove it. I feel a lot of the problem for sports like speedway is not the lack of popular sporting figureheads, but the fact that when I was young we actually played outside!

We had to amuse ourselves and make our own entertainment. If this was wearing a crash helmet and Dad's overalls poised for a picture, then this was what we did! We had no computers, no Playstations, No gameboys, all we had was fun!

My drive for the love of speedway and I'm certain other speedway families is the introduction to our own children and their friends to gain their familiarization of this great sport. Here in Canada, we have a harder time to explain what speedway is when questioned. Is that moto-X?? is always the question asked! Frustrating to say the least, but without fans such as us promoting the sport and our own great sporting heroes that go back years, then speedway will struggle on the global scale.

I commend everyone for their support of speedway and hope that websites and articles such as you print, will give the sport a realism that it can only go one way from here and that's up!

This article was first published on 11th September 2005

Tony Richardson:

"I too remember riding my pedal bike around the back garden with my 2 brothers & some friends, using the 3 trees we had as markers for the corners.

We also used the roads in a new building site in the winter for cycle ice speedway.

As you were saying with all the computers, TV programmes and the society we live in kids don't go out much to play."

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