Whatever the weather...

Off-road sport takes place all year round and we expect virtually anything, from rock hard frozen gound to liquid mud and dust storms. 

 

But at least you can usually make an intelligent guess as to what you are going to face and when. 

 

At the moment we are wondering who would be an organiser. Just a couple of weeks ago events were being cancelled all over the country with waterlogged tracks. 

 

This was, of course, made all the more incongruous as many of these events were taking place in parts of the country that were officialy designated as being in drought! 

 

Even the big Red Bull Pro Nats opener was cancelled. A very clever move it proved too, as when it was staged just two weeks later the venue was in perfect condition. 

 

But in truth running events has always been a lottery with the weather. The Wetherby club's always excellent Wainright National trial takes place in the middle of what we call summer. 

 

I have ridden in the event when the Yorkshire moors have been baked hard, with the becks bone dry and the risk of sun-stroke a genuine possibility. I can't claim that I actually enjoyed riding in those conditions but there were more than 200 of us, so it was the same for everyone.

 

I have also ridden in years when those riding have been both freezing cold and soaked to the skin with those same becks raging torrents. 

 

Strange to say but that didn't bother me too much. Trials used to be a mainly winter sport anyway and that's how I liked it.

 

With trials in winter, motocross is the off-road world's sport of choice in the summer and dust and heat are part-and-parcel of the deal.

 

The problem of late though has been simply one of total unpredictability. 

 

Right up to the day before meetings, hard-pushed organisers don't know whether to water their tracks or just wait for the deluge. Get it wrong either way and you can precipitate a disaster. 

 

Water the night before and if it rains you have a guaranteed mudbath.

 

Don't water and you can guarantee the sun will be out at dawn and by 7am the track will be so dry that water wouldn't touch it even if you tried – it would simply run straight off.

 

However, you'd think that the MXGP in Brazil would have been a festival of sunbaked motocross heaven wouldn't you? Not so, as we found out it was a total mudbath. 

 

Ditto the first-ever World Trial staged in Australia last weekend. Of course it chucked it down at the venue for the first time in 4X knows how many years!