Sport, Sports Entertainment or Entertainment Sport?

In this week’s Speedway Star the always-engaging Peterborough and Rye House presenter Craig Saul makes an interesting philosophical observation when he deliberately classifies speedway as “sports entertainment”

The exact quote reads as follows:
“What we – at least claim we – are promoting in 2007 is ‘sports entertainment’, rather than pure sport, but you must be careful not to cross the line into ‘entertainment sport’ and alienate the purists.”

I appreciate that we’re all there to (hopefully) be entertained but I always thought that speedway was seen and run as a “pure sport”? Or am I just being naive?

Actually that said the same issue contains news that the invitation only privately owned BSI Grand Prix series is changing the points scoring system rules again for the final and semi-finals allegedly “to try and find a fairer method of determining the World Champion”.

In reality, this change is solely to string out the mystery for longer for the televising companies who, for the last two years, have had to endure some end of season Grand Prix events where the identity of the World Champion is already known. This doesn’t keep the viewers tuning in and, thereby, undermines the value of the product proposition for their lucrative advertisers. With eleven events to be staged in 2007, the lack of anticipation would be more of a problem if it recurred. So with this creative but slightly barmy fiddling with the scoring system by the ridiculously grandiosely named (and self-elected) “GP Directorate”, they hope to restore as much punch to the series for 2007 as you allegedly get from a visit to the hotel bar in Oz with Johnno.