You’ve just won your second world title, you’ve climbed to the top of the mountain again after months and months of hard work, and now your season is finished. What do you do next? Perhaps you take a holiday? Or maybe go on a junk-food binge? A party? Well, if you’re Speedway World Champion Tai Woffinden you don’t do any of those things. You get straight back to work.
“The last round of the GP series was in Australia so that night I had some champagne with my family and went to bed pretty early, ordered a load of room service and sat up with my fiancé just enjoying some bad food. Then I took the next day off, the only day off I’ve had since I won the title. I just chilled out and then got back to it.”
Tai was presented with the FIM Speedway Grand Prix World Championship trophy on Saturday, 24 October and by the Monday he was back in the gym planning his assault on the 2016 championship. No rest, no let up, just business.
“Some people would’ve taken a few weeks off, maybe I would’ve done a few years ago, but my first thought was just getting back to it and working hard. Training isn’t a chore for me, it’s a lifestyle. You can tell someone until you’re blue in the face to go and work out but until they want to they won’t go. Well I want to, I enjoy it because I know it pays off.
“I always go back to Australia during winter and I love it. I change my number and my email address and I just go and forget about speedway. I train and get myself in shape but I don't think about speedway at all. Sometimes my mates will start talking about it and I’m just not interested, I have to switch off. I basically give myself four months where I don’t even think about it.
“Everyone is different, some people need to be consumed by it, but that’s not me. I get on with my training and back in Europe I know that my team have everything under control so when I do head back over I know everything is ready for me. I do my business on the track.”
He may take a four-month sabbatical from the shale but as soon as he’s in race-mode, the World Champion is a fierce and ruthless competitor. This is a man who knows what he wants and he seems to have struck upon a pretty good formula to get it.
He says: “Motivation is just built into me, everything I do I want to be the best. Literally everything. When I drive somewhere I’ll race myself, I’ll make a little race in my head about how quickly I can get to a road sign or whether I can beat the car next to me to the bridge. When I’m at an airport I’ll race people through security, it’s just how I am.
“I can’t help it, I just want to win at everything. It’s great that I’ve won two world titles, if I retired tomorrow I’d be happy with what I’ve done but then what would be next? I know what I’m good at, I’m good at riding a speedway bike, so I need to make the most of it. While I’m still racing, I’ll want to be the best in the world so that’s what motivates me. I want to look back when I retire and know that I did everything properly and gave myself the greatest chance to be the best I can be.”
And he is the best. 2015 saw Woffinden recapture the title he lost to Monster Energy stablemate Greg Hancock in 2014 in emphatic style, and the smart money would point to the Team GB captain becoming the first British man to win the world crown three times next season.
But how did he get to this point? Born in Scunthorpe, England and raised in Western Australia, it hasn’t been an easy ride - just ask the man himself.
“We moved to Australia when I was little and I started to ride speedway because my dad was a speedway rider, so he taught me. I was pretty good and then when I was about 14 they said ‘you’ve got to go to Europe and make a job of it’.
“So as soon as I turned 15 my parents packed up their lives in Aussie and we moved back to Scunthorpe so I could become professional. We lived in a caravan because everything went into my racing, so it was a big change. One day you’re on the beach in Perth and the next you’re living in a caravan in the freezing cold in England.
“When I was a kid the thought of moving to Europe to race motorbikes sounded amazing, it sounded so much more fun than going to the beach every day. Now I realise I had it pretty good! When I go back now I realise how lucky I was and I try to enjoy every minute. But obviously I wouldn’t change anything, I’m just grateful to my parents for making the sacrifice they did.”
Tai’s career was on an exclusively upwards trajectory until 2010, when his father Rob was diagnosed with terminal cancer. It also happened to be the year Tai made his debut in the Speedway Grand Prix series - just months after his dad passed away.
“My dad told me not to do the GP’s, he knew I wasn’t really ready. But I was young and until that point everything had just gone perfectly, so I didn’t see how it couldn’t go well. When he passed away I went to a pretty bad place and it was just a nightmare year.
“My dad was a racer himself so when I was learning to ride he taught me everything. How to dive-bomb someone (a speedway term for aggressively passing on the inside of a corner), how to go round the outside, how to cut back on people, how to get yourself out of trouble, how to lay the bike down safely.
“When we came to England we did everything together, we lived together and he was my mechanic, we washed the bikes together, travelled together, everything. He was the biggest influence on my career and still is now. So it got pretty tough when he went.”
Tai is a complex and interesting character. He enjoys the publicity he gets from being a sporting star but hates the restrictions it places on him, while he admits to enjoying earning good money but knows that it doesn’t last forever.
Explains Tai: “Of course the money is nice but it comes and goes. The extra fame I’ve got now is cool but sometimes I hate it because there are so many things I can’t say or do. Sometimes I want to say exactly how I feel but I can’t because it’ll upset someone, so it isn’t all good. Maybe when I retire I’ll spill all the beans and say everything I want to say!
“I like having a bigger profile but it doesn’t mean anything if I don’t win. I get the recognition because I win, so I guess they go hand-in-hand. If I keep winning titles my profile will get bigger and I’ll have to bite my tongue even more!”
Don’t bet against Tai having to bite his tongue a fair amount over the next few years, then. For a 15-year-old kid whose family risked it all to see him succeed - he’s not made a bad fist of it so far.
