Excerpt From: Dirt Bikes and Diapers by Michael James

...The promoters, however, are not listening to the silent grumblings of the over-thirty crowd. We are the ones with the jobs, homes, families and employers that need us to be there on Monday morning. We can’t afford to be laid up because of a monster triple or war zone-style rocker section. There are more 25+ B and 30+ B riders than there are 125 and 250 A riders; why then do the tracks have to resemble the private playgrounds of the AMA-Pro wannabes? Why can’t there be an "A" only section or sections? The Connecticut River MX track (Doug Henry and John Dowd’s practice track) has loops around every single jump. Why can’t race promoters follow suit? I, much as most of the Vet C and B riders out there, have given up on the "I’m gonna be Pro one day" dream.

Our reality is getting together on the weekends and racing our little buns off against each other, not against Albertyn and Lusk. We accept and crave our own pace of racing. We desire to aspire to greater results; we wouldn’t be racers if we didn’t. It just gets really hard to justify the possible plaster when the rewards are weighed against the risk of casing a double or flipping through a rocker section.

Again, I say, the Vets are the ones who pay for their own racing, as well as for their offspring’s. Vet riders, it is time to take matters into our own hands and let the promoters know that our egos are left at home and we don’t need to prove to ourselves how easily we break and how long we take to heal. Motocross is inherently dangerous and the new-wave obstacles are an unnecessary risk for us in an already risky sport. Let’s have tracks that we can all have fun on and feel like we are "Pros for a day." The differences for me this year were a third and a fourth at the Broome-Tioga National - my best finishes of the year - against tougher-than-local competition and painful crashes and injuries on jump and whoop-infested local tracks. There is too much of a variance in what normal people have to practice on and what we race on. This will cause even more injuries in Y2K.

Unless the situation is dealt with, Motocross is Motocross; Supercross is Supercross - when did the two get mixed up?

Anyone who wishes to comment on this matter, please e-mail me promptly at Vetb882@aol.com. I will put the comments up on a Web page I am working on and let’s see if we can get a new Vet movement going.

We are the backbone of the sport and need to be heard - our needs are not being met.