What a great opener!
By TMX Archives on 7th Jan 09
Editor, JD, took-in Sheffield last weekend and now he has a new belief in the sport that he loves, plus he mourns the death of a couple of golden oldies...
FIRST of all I trust that everyone enjoyed a jolly Christmas holiday, however brief (or indeed however long) it may have been. Thanks to the way Christmas fell this year, even us T+MX editorial wallahs managed a five-day break - and I can't recall that happening in living memory! And we made the most of it as no doubt next year we'll be back to just Christmas Day and Boxing Day - I don't want to know, so I won't look until I have to.
Whatever, however much I enjoy sweeping leaves at home and visiting the bottle bank, staggering desperately with my embarrassingly large bags of merry festive empty bottles and drained cans, and watching my DVD of The Great Escape, once more willing McQueen to jump that Triumph (why did the Germans have a Triumph? It should have been a BMW!) over the fence, it was good to get back to reality in the New Year - if you call indoor trials reality that is.
And so to Sheffield we went, in order to christen the New Year with a little International competition. And it was more than worth the effort, actually being worth the trip alone just to see Dougie clean those logs in the final to take the lead in front of all those young whipper-snappers. It may only have been a fleeting moment but it assured me that Doug will enjoy a good outdoor season in 2009. I think that the young pretenders have at least another year to wait before they can start thinking about a top-six ranking, no way is Doug sliding out there this year! Which will bring us round to Sheffield 2010. Anyone like a bet that Doug won't be back?
It was good to see such a fantastic turnout of spectators too. We all know how precarious are the times that we find ourselves living in but the Sheffield crowd proved my Christmas theory - and that was that there are a lot of things that we'll live without first before we give up on our sport...
THE recent holiday season was unfortunately saddened for many of us by several notable deaths in the off-road community, Gordon Francis and Bill Grant. Gordon was a photographer whose pictures were bywords for technical excellence and which he had been taking for over six decades. His great love was the classic off-road scene and his work will be greatly missed by all involved. Gordon could be relied on 100 per cent to provide a suitable, excellent photo for virtually any occasion. As he lived in Dorset and myself in Cumbria I met Gordon rarely, the last time we chatted eye to eye rather than on the phone was over a bacon bun at Alan Wright's Classic Show last year, but it was always a pleasure and privelege to speak with him as he was a true fount of knowledge. The tragedy is that all that knowledge disappears with the person - but at least in Gordon's case he produced several cracking books of his shots, complete with informative captions which can continue to be enjoyed - and I'm hanging on to mine.
Bill Grant was a quiet man, unknown to most of you, but he was a set-piece in the Scottish Six Days Trial organising team for many, many years. It brought it home to me the sort of time span we are talking as Bill used to talk to my daughter in the SSDT office each night when I went to pick up the daily results and invariably got involved in some discussion or other. Liesel was only about four years old when she first went to the office with me and Bill presented her with his SSDT official's rosette at the end of the week. Time passes quickly because, as usual, he handed-over his rosette to her in May last year - and Lee is 24 now...
We make long lasting friendships in motorcycling and while it is indeed sad to see the passing of people like Gordon and Bill, all our lives are much, much richer for having known them.
FINALLY congratulations to Sammy Miller on being awarded an MBE in the New Year's Honours list. Leaving aside Sam's incomparable competition achievements, his work on the museum and the restorations he has carried out on a wide variety of genuinely historic machines, that is, bikes with real providence and of genuine importance to future generations rather than simply old bikes, richly deserves an award of merit.
Wonder which bike Sam will make his trip to the palace on - the four-cylinder Gilera would be my choice although the bellow from those open megas might just scare the
horses...