wmx article

Mx sports decided to kill wmx. Weather it was worth it is debatable.

"In the context of being asked to help shape the direction of the WMA, American Honda maintained it was not a battle for them to fight.
"Ultimately the promoter has to decide these things," said Ray Conway, director of racing motorcycle sports motorcycle division, American Honda. "Honda's position is, we're not going to tell the promoter how to run their business.""

Looooooool, really Honda you expect us to believe that you don't try to influence promoters

I think the WMX is such small potatoes that Honda isn't going to waste time or money on it, now if it was worth doing you can bet Honda would be using its influence.

The thing is that most fans of any sport want to watch the series with the most talent, not the most competitive. For example, in MotoGP the Moto3 and Moto2 classes are far more competitive then the MotoGP class and yet the MotoGP class draws the biggest audience. It's also the same reason why people will watch sports in the Olympics that they'd never watch otherwise. Series' with lower talent level tend to be followed by diehards who need more then the premier leagues to get their fix.

There is no debating that the WMX class is weaker then the 450MX or 250MX class; the fastest women are slower then the guys running 40th in the 250MX class. So WMX is third tier. The problem is that motocross is a small sport and so there are less diehards to watch lower level classes. Another problem with being a small sport is that TV coverage is harder to get, especially since there's four 30 minute motos to cover. By cutting WMX, MX Sports made the time span between the first and last moto much shorter and therefore allowed for better TV coverage.

What MX Sports did was in the best interest of the sport, and in my opinion they tried to keep WMX alive longer then they should have. The series couldn't survive on it's own, and it was time to pull the life support.

Can't blame MX Sports, they're kind of caught between a rock and a hard place with this one but it's shocking to me the lack of foresight by the manufacturers and the rest of the industry biz....

Women are the fastest growing segment of the motorcycling world which isn't exactly booming right now. You'd think they would be more interested in fostering a more inviting environment for females rather than continuing to treat them like second class citizens. There's so much potential for growth and it feels like it's mostly being ignored because it doesn't easily mesh with the traditions of the sport. The hands off approach from Honda is indicative of how little they care because Honda never misses a chance to stack the deck in their favour when it comes to anything they even remotely care about.