Picture the scene
Published: 12th July 2007
Author: Sean Lawless
It's 6.30 on a Monday morning, gale force winds are blowing in wave after wave of horizontal rain, whatever direction I look the sky is an angry shade of dark grey and I'm gripping onto the edge of an already buckled gazebo, trying to stop it joining the other tents blowing across the campsite.
There's rain running down the sleeve of my big Fox waterproof and, just to top it all, I'm wearing flip-flops! At this precise point I'd gladly exchange various bits of my anatomy (well I could spare one of them) for a warm bed but I'm in a field in Somerset and my mega-tog duvet is a long, long way away!
Billed as the biggest music festival in the world, a staggering 177,500 people rocked up at this year's Glastonbury. And apart from a few fairly fleeting breaks in the downpour it basically didn't stop raining from the moment I arrived on the Thursday night to the moment I climbed into my new bestest, bestest buddies' warm and dry Beemer about lunchtime the following Monday. And do you know what? I loved damn near every moment of it!
The festival-hardened crowd I'd gone with were almost apologetic. "It's the worse we've ever seen it!" "You'll have to come again next year!" "Don't let it put you off!" "Why are you grinning?" "How much cider have you had?" Believe it or not, I wasn't grinning because my cider visor was up and running (although by this point it was fully functional), I was grinning because compared with, say, the Foxhill des Nations in '98, the Foxhill GP in Y2K and last year's MXdN at Matterley Basin it was a piece of cake.
Okay, so the Glastonbury site is much larger than either Matterley or Foxhill but just say it's four times the size and you've got four times the number of people, then scale it down and proportionally everything's about equal. So why can Glastonbury operate fine and dandy thank you very much when events at Foxhill and Matterley slid into anarchy?
There are lots of reasons - plenty of security, a bloody great wall around the site, loads of bins, thousands of toilets, miles of interlinked metal sheets through the campsites - but almost everything boils down to one thing. Experience*. I'm sure the driving force behind staging something like Glastonbury is the same sort of passion that makes people want to stage big MX events but as well as this passion they've also got experience drawn from the last 30-odd years to fall back on.
This year we've got two 'British' GPs to look forward to - one at a new track at Donington Park and the other at a new track at Moneyglass Demesne in Northern Ireland. I'm not for one moment doubting the experience of the promoters behind these events but if we're to learn from past mistakes and grow these events for the future then we need some continuity rather than bouncing around the countryside from venue to venue.
* Actually, there is another factor in all of this - and I'm sad to say that it reflects badly on all of us - and that's the mentality of the paying public. It seems we can't stage a major MX event in this country without the riot police paying it a visit but throughout the whole weekend at Glastonbury I saw no trouble at all. I did see some revellers in some incredible states but I didn't witness any drunken fights, no-one pushed over any porta-poopers and there was even a well-observed policy of using the toilets instead of the hedgerows. I guess that's hippies for you...they've got the hair but don't know how to let it down!