Time to make your Mark!
By TMX Archives on 28th Jan 10
NOW that we're into the New Year and most of the teams and race schedules have been sorted, we got to thinking about the 2010 Motocross des Nations or Motocross of Nations' as Youthstream would have us call it and perhaps, more importantly, who will be making the arrangements and selection of the team representing Britain this year when the event takes place on September 26 at Thunder Valley, Colorado, in the good old US of A.
You will recall that Mark Eastwood, selected by the ACU last year as British team manager, was eventually sacked when Youthstream declared him a ‘persona non grata' (an individual not welcome) at the event.
The reason for Youthstream's decision to effectively ban Eastwood from the event was that Mark featured in a magazine article and was quite forthright in his views on modern day top level motocross and how he considered that many of the recent ‘developments' were actually diminishing the attraction of the sport.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the situation, the ACU binned him and temporarily seconded Sonia Goggin, secretary to the Motocross Committee, into the roll of team manager as a temporary measure.
Since that time we've not heard a peep from the ACU as to who has been appointed to, or even on the short-list for, the position for 2010.
So, we thought we'd give them a little help and ask the readers of T+MX to offer up some suggestions as to who they think would make a good team-manager for this year's British MX des Nations squad. In recent years the post has been given to former riders who have still had strong links with the sport, but there's nothing to prevent a good communicator or administrator from being proposed.
We'll short-list the top four according to the number of nominations each receives from you, our readers, and then give everyone the chance to vote, via our website, on those to four nominations.
You can e-mail Mannix Devlin – mannix.devlin@tmxnews.co.uk – with your initial suggestions (serious ones please), tagging the mail with ‘British Nations Manager' in the ‘Subject' line.