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| What have wolves, cheetahs and meerkats got to do with a sports museum? The explanation is simple. (Or should it be simples?) The Speedway Museum is to be found inside Paradise Wildlife Park because the animal attraction’s owner is Peter Sampson, a sixties speedway rider who offered the proposed museum a home. This throws up the curious situation where you have to pay the admission charge for a wildlife park to get into a museum about sport. That said and done, the Speedway Museum packs an extraordinary amount into one large room – an Aladdin’s cave for the dirt-track and brake-less motorcycle sport that is now rarely seen beyond Sky TV. An extension - adding a third to the museum's size - opened on 21 May. There are bikes (including one donated by recent three-time world champion Jason Crump), jackets, leathers, trophies, posters, film highlights and extremely evocative photographs. Kiwi greats Ivan Mauger and Barry Briggs are among the museum’s backers and visitors come from just as far afield, despite the unusual location. Speedway has a history worth finding out about. In common with perhaps only basketball, its origins can be traced with some precision – to a first meeting in New South Wales in 1923 and, in the UK, at Epping Forest in 1928. Perhaps inevitably, there are rival claimants from other towns in 1927. The museum also takes in speedway's long connection with the old Wembley Stadium, which hosted world championship finals between 1936 and 1981, the boom in cycle speedway in Britain’s bombed cities after the Second World War, and the Soviet and eastern bloc strength in the sport. It features a tribute to Peter Craven, the only Englishman to twice be world individual champion. Craven’s second triumph was at Wembley in front of 62,000 fans in 1962, but he was killed in a track accident the following year, aged just 29. Welshman Freddie Williams shares the distinction of being a double champion. While the sport is best known for being ridden on dirt tracks, the museum also showcases ice speedway, the terrifying-looking version popular in countries with colder climates in northern Europe, using bikes with studded tyres and spikes. sportcloseup’s verdict: if you are at all interested in this neglected sport, don’t be put off by the museum’s location or its limited size.
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