Mauger: the last hurrah

Press, 10 January 1986, Page 21

Mauger: the last hurrah

By

ROD DEW

A man who is universally regarded as the greatest speedway rider of all time, Ivan Mauger, is about to hang his racing leathers up for the final time, ending an illustrious career which began in Christchurch at the old Aranui Stadium more than 30 years ago.

The only person to win the world individual speedway championship six times, Mauger, now 46, will make his farewell competitive appearance in Canterbury in the international Champion Spark Plug World Jubilee Series meeting at the Handy Hire Speedway, Ruapuna Park, on Sunday afternoon.

After that, there will be two more international meetings — one at Wanganui on January 18 and another at Auckland’s newly renovated Western Springs Stadium in February — and then it will be all over.

Behind him he will leave a record of success in speedway sport which might never be equalled. As well as being the only person to win the world championship three times in succession, and the only person to win the crown six times, he has won the European championship four times, been a member of the winning side in the world best pairs championship twice, and been a member of the winning team in the World

Team Cup contest four times.

And if that is not enough, three victories in the world 1000 m long track championship and more than 1000 wins in major international contests can be added to the list.

On two occasions, he was voted New Zealand “Sportsman of the Year,” and in 1975 he was awarded an M.B.E. in the New Year honours list for service to speedway. . In spite of all this, Ivan Mauger cheerfully admits to being “never satisfied.” He might have 15 world championship gold medals, but he also has about 16 silver medals which are a constant reminder to him that he might have done even better. “There is,” he says, “a tale behind each of these defeats.” He has never won a world championship as a result of someone else’s bad luck, but he lost three himself through ill fortune. Two of these remain engraved on his mind.

The first was the speedway final in Poland in 1976. He was leading his third heat by more than 30 metres when his carburettor failed half a lap from the finish. A win would have left him with 14 points and in a run-off with Peter

Collins (England) for the title. Instead, he didn’t even get among the first three on the rostrum.

Even more frustrating was his experience at the 1978 world long track final at Muhldorf in West Germany. After four unbeaten rides, he was five points clear and needed only one second or two fourths from his final two races to win the title. He was first out the gate on his fifth ride, only to find he could not change into second gear. He finally made the change but had to come back from the rear of the field and finished third.

A quick check of the gearbox failed to reveal any problem before the final heat. He again led the field out the gate, and again the gears proved difficult to change. “I passed two riders and needed to overtake only one more to be assured of outright victory when the gearbox shaft broke completely. I didn’t even finish. I can’t remember anyone else ever having this sort of luck,” he recalled. Many of his followers regard the 1973 world championship in Poland as the one that got away. Mauger and a little-regarded Pole, Jerzy Szczakiel, ended up in a run-off for the world crown. Mauger deliberately allowed the Pole to win the race off the line, confident that he could pass him easily enough later in the race.

“I didn’t expect to pass him until the second lap, but I caught him much sooner. He heard me coming, closed the gap and throttled off. I hit him as if he was a stationary vehicle. Everybody said Jerzy panicked, but I misjudged things. It was not bad luck, it was bad riding on may part. I was over-confident. I learned a

big lesson when I was lying on the grond in front of 140,000 people.” His most memorable success was in the 1970 world speedway final at the Wroclaw track in the same country. “This was the hardest world final I have ever been in. Fifteen of the 16 riders in the field had the ability to win.” Mauger had the misfortune to draw the worst start position, No. 3, on the grid for his decided race but won the race, scoring a maximum 15 points and winning the world title by a single point from Pawel Waloszek (Poland).

“The track was so bad and so hard on the No. 3 grid, and yet I probably made the best start I ever made in a world championship. I don’t think I have ever had, before or since, a concentration level as high. I was absolutely determined to win that meeting.” An unbending determination to succeed, a very high level of concentration, and superb preparation, all allied to lightning reflexes and a lot of natural talent, helped Ivan Mauger become speedway’s most successful rider. And yet there was a period when he felt there might not be a future for him. When he first went to England as a 17-year-old in 1957, he was hailed as the “wonder boy” of the future, another Ronnie Moore. But he found the going very tough in trying to break into the Wimbledon squad, and at the end of 1958, rather disillusioned, he returned to New Zealand.

Several seasons racing in Australia restored his confidence, and when he returned to England in 1963 to ride for Newcastle he was a much tougher proposition. Progress was rapid. In 1966

he won his first European championship and qualified for his first world final. He finished fourth. The next year he was third. He won the first leg of his triple crown at Gothenberg in 1968, and won again in 1969 (Wembley) and in 1970 (Poland).

In 1972 he won the world title for a fourth time, at Wembley, and few expected him to extend this already impressive record. But five years later he won his fifth title at Gothenberg, and collected his record sixth win in Poland in 1979. He was then just 38 days short' of his fortieth birthday, and the oldest rider to win the world title. There is an element of risk in speedway racing, and Mauger has experienced his share of tumbles. Ironically, he suffered his worst crash in one of his World Jublee meetings in Poland last year. A liberal watering of the track just before the start made the surface slippery in parts. Mauger and a Polish rider were battling for the lead entering the third turn in the first heat and neither would give way. Both went down, and the rest of the field cannoned into them.

Mauger broke his left heel, his right leg in two places, suffered chest injuries, dislocated his left elbow, broke his nose and suffered eye injuries. “I have never been hurt as bad. No-one could stop. The riders threw their bikes down, but they aquaplaned in the wet surface.” Three weeks later Mauger upheld the tradition of speedway riders putting honour before pain and injury when he rode in the world long track final. “It was pretty much a token effort, but this was my fiftysecond world final and I was going to ride, regardless.”

He is still not fully recov-

ered. His right leg is not strong enough to run on and he has not been able to lift weights since the accident. By the end of the present series, he feels he will be fit enough to start training, and he intends to do so, even though his racing career will be at an end. He has always placed a lot of emphasis on fitness, and has no intention of letting this slip in his retirement. Mauger has no sense of

real loss as he edges towards total retirement (he retired from British league racing in 1981). After all this time, he admits, with some reluctance, that he is “getting a little fed up with racing.” But there is more than a flicker of the old Mauger determination remaining. He won the New Zealand long track championship at Dunedin, recently, from a field which included the

reigning world long track champion, Simon Wigg (England), and the leader of the New Zealand jubilee series, John Cook (United States). “On the long track you don’t have to be quite so alert and sharp. But you have got to perform well at very high speeds and I have always been able to do that.” Rather uncharacteristically, Mauger does not rate

his chances of winning the Ruapuna round of his series very highly. “To be realistic, I should not be able to win speedway against these young riders who have their careers in front of them. There was a time when I thought it was the end of the world if I got beaten. Now I am happy if the meeting is a good one, and I am very pleased to be holding third place in the series behind John Cook and

Simon Wigg.”: At the same time, he is quick to point out that in spite of the many promotional problems he is confronted with in running the series, he has beaten every member of the touring troupe at one time or another. There is an unmistakable ring of satisfaction in his voice when he says: “When I was 25, there never was a 46-year-old who could beat me.”