Australia did not have everything their own way in Cardiff on Saturday. Just after their cricketers beat Pakistan speedway's British grand prix began at the Millennium stadium a few hundred yards away. The best Australian was second; a Swede won; none of the seven Britons reached the last eight. It might have been tennis a decade ago.
But speedway is not like that - another sport where our boys have been overtaken. "Who can forget the incredible night at Coventry last July," said one preview, "when Martin Dugard stormed through to echo Mark Loram's achievements in Sweden the previous season, becoming only the second wild card entry to win a grand prix?" Not many, as only 7,000 were there. By the same token few can forget that Loram is world champion, British though he is. He clinched his title in Bydgoszcz. Who would remember that?
No one knows because little sports are endangered species beneath the predatory march of football - ashes to ashes, dirt to dust. Dirt-track has a history of surge and slump. In the early 70s it was second to football as a spectator sport. Seven years ago it was dying on its wheels. Cardiff was proof that its heart beats again, proof too that Wembley has lost the plot.
By coincidence speedway was first recognised in 1923, the year of Wembley's first Cup final. By 1937, the second year of the world championship, Wembley was the sport's international home. When Ole Olsen won three titles in the 70s crowds touched 100,000. Then the sport ran down with the stadium. On Saturday Cardiff stole another bit of Wembley's heritage.
The renaissance came about in 1995 with a switch of format from one-off championship to grand prix series. Britain barely had the stadia to participate. Hackney was refurbished for the first two, Bradford hosted the third, Coventry had three. The third was put on by Benfield Sports International, who secured a five-year deal with the governing body to run the series from 2000. With a rev and a roar the sport, like the stadium, has left the 20th century behind. Sky and sponsors ride pillion.
Last year, at 7,000, Coventry was only three-quarters full. It was the best venue of an old lot that smack of untouched Third Division football grounds. At Cardiff there were 31,250, more than for the LDV Vans Trophy final. The presentation reverberated with pride, confidence, spectacle and 31,249 claxons. The programme is a masterpiece for all comers, essential filling in to follow the heats.
The driving force, Benfield's chief executive John Postlethwaite, was formerly commercial director of Benetton's formula one operation. It showed in the razzmatazz of champagne squirting at the end, with cannon firing red confetti over the podium. The covered stadium embraced and enhanced it all with thumping music. "Cardiff is the new spiritual home of speedway," said Postlethwaite. It was hard to hear or argue.
Olsen, now race director of the six-race series, agreed: "The atmosphere was tremendous. I'm sure we are going in the right direction." It does not come cheap; the £700,000 outlay covered yet another shifting of turf, piled on pallets outside the track, which had been laid with 1,800 tons of shale from Derby. A rock concert and motor show are next.
Riders, too, approved. Jason Crump, who came second, said it was "great for the sport". Tomasz Gollob, the Pole who came third, said "it would be good if all GPs could be in places like this". The winner Tony Rickardsson, who would have had a world hat-trick last year but for the Stowmarket man the Poles call Loramski, said the race was "greater than the result". Crump rides for Kings Lynn, Rickardsson for Poole, enhancing local support.
Speedway is big in Sweden and Poland and each added some 2,000 to an attendance that abounded with families. "It is a safe family sport," said Nicola Sands and there was none of the coarse inanity or drunkenness that disfigures football. "People get hooked on it." She went once with her father in Glasgow and bears it out. She is now Benfield's Speedway World Cup events manager. "I'm perfectly normal apart from this," she adds.
The pits were in the bowels of the stadium where £30,000- a-week footballers disgorged for last month's Cup final. Each of the 24 riders had a bench, a rubberised duckboard about the size of a garage and mostly three bikes.
Rune Holta covered his with rugs as if aware it was Derby day, going good to firm. The rest had sleek covers, dizzy with sponsors' names like London phone kiosks with ladies' cards. Bikes are 500cc, with no gears or brakes. They weigh at least 80kg, heavier than the riders, have mud deflectors like a duck's tail and mudguards like raised eyebrows.
"Engines start 7pm," said the programme and they hardly stopped until 10pm as the 24 heats unfolded in slick succession. Before each one four leggy Poles (the Beans perhaps), performed a stately walk twirling coloured umbrellas as the riders came under orders.
The start itself is one of those rituals that are the peculiar charm of sport. The starter, dressed like a Newcastle player of 1900, stands facing the four bikes, whose front wheels nose white tapes stretched between two poles. He holds his hands out sideways, drops them to his sides, then strides out between the bikes like a bowler measuring his run. After three paces the tapes go up behind him and the bikes go off with a spurt of shale like raspberries.
The first corner is crucial. Not until the fifth heat was there real jousting and someone overtook but chances seem to recur as bikes buck and twitch and riders wrestle in power-slides. Benfield's introduction of air barriers took the sting out of some spectacular crashes. Riders kept coming back for more on another bike.
Accidents produced comparative hush, though not down to the levels which Henry Blofeld was complaining of from Pakistan's followers down the road. Here were real horns and blowers to match. Speedway's heart is not only beating but hooting with new excitement.
British world champions with wheels of steel
Peter Collins (1976)
The Belle Vue rider, pictured left, was only 22 when he won the world title in front of a crowd of 100,000 in Chorzow, Poland, in September 1976. Collins, quiet and unassuming off the track, grew up in Lymm in Cheshire and progressed rapidly through the Belle Vue ranks. Such was his popularity after winning the world title - the first British rider to do so for 14 years - that he finished fourth in the BBC sports personality of the year award in 1976.
Michael Lee (1980)
Lee was an outsider going into the world final in Gothenburg in September, having finished only sixth in the intercontinental final at White City the month before, behind his compatriot Chris Morton. But in the world final it was a different story, with Lee winning four of his five heats to beat Dave Jessup of Great Britain and Billy Sanders from Australia.
Gary Havelock (1992)
Britain's most successful rider of the 90s also won the world title in Poland, this time at Wroclaw. The flamboyant Bradford biker appeared for his first final wearing beads in his hair and wearing fluorescent yellow and he won in spectacular style. After a nasty smash, Havelock was grateful for a sudden downpour that allowed him to recover from a leg injury and he went on to win the championship with 14 points after streaking away to claim the final heat.