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Speedway champion Tai Woffinden details heartache that fired him to the top and how he deals with internet trolls in new book
Tai Woffinden is Britain’s three-time world speedway champion who was marked out for greatness at an early age but whose path to the top rarely ran smooth.
Growing up in public, the mis-steps and controversies were plentiful, with Woffinden’s readiness to express his opinions, usually in forthright terms, giving him a reputation as something of a fire-starter.
Now, having just turned 29, the one-time wild-child is at the top of his profession. A glance at the record books will inform him that he is the most successful British rider of all time, with no competition in sight.
He can savour life as a happily married man with a young family, financially secure in the renovated six-bedroom farmhouse he laboured on to provide his dream home.
Time then, to take stock, for Woffinden to open a window into what drove him onwards when his career seemed set to dissolve amid family traumas and his love of the party lifestyle.
The insight comes in his new autobiography, Raw Speed, published this week and coinciding with Saturday’s British Grand Prix at Cardiff’s Principality Stadium, the highpoint of the domestic calendar.
And ‘raw’ is certainly an apt description as Woffinden pours his heart out over the death of his father in a book movingly dedicated to his lost parent. The pivotal event in the development of his career, this is the turning point, a tragedy that pointed the way for the precocious but not always focused teenager.
He traces his thinking from the moment he heard his father, former rider Rob Woffinden, was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in early 2009. Within a year, aged just 47, he was gone.
“When dad got sick, I mentally rehearsed everything. He’d died in my head like a hundred times. We’d been to hospital, we’d been to the funeral place, done this, done that, all that sort of stuff,” Woffinden writes.
“I used to lie in my bed, imagine that he had died and that I went to the crem and did all that, carried his coffin, spoke at his funeral. I’d been through it like two, three thousand times, so I mentally prepared myself for it. And it worked.”
At that point in his career, Woffinden had already won the British under-21 title and was being touted as a grand prix sensation, but there were questions. He had the talent, but did he have the single-minded commitment that hallmarks champions?
Woffinden looks back at the dark days at the start of the decade, when he faced a new season without his father. “He had always wanted to see the start of the 2010 season, that was his dream but he never did make it,” he says.
“When that happened, it was kind of like the turning point in my life, my career. It’s a shame it took my dad dying for me to grow up and do that. If he was still with us, would I have been a three-time world champion, or would it just have been a case of what if? Who knows.”
Woffinden’s book, co-authored with Peter Oakes, a former Fleet Street sports editor and now speedway’s foremost journalist, also provides a highly opinionated and often brutally frank assessment of his sport, and the people in it.
His chapter on racing rivalries, notably with Danish hard man Nicki Pedersen and fellow Brit Ben Barker, is said to have to been toned down by the lawyers but still offers a fascinating insight into how riders get on with each other - or in some cases, most definitely don’t.
There are also his thoughts on Britain’s international set-up, with Woffinden relating his astonishment at being told the team meal before a big meeting would be taken at a nearby kebab emporium.
Thus it was no surprise that Woffinden declined to be a part of the Team GB set-up for a couple of seasons. He also, in common with nearly every other Grand Prix rider, does not ride in British club speedway, absences that have not always been appreciated by the twittersphere.
True to character, Woffinden does not take kindly to such criticisms. In another illuminating passage in his book, he describes how he hunts down the trolls, and uses their abuse to strengthen his resolve.
He says: “I know that some people think I’m arrogant, self-centred and selfish. Equally, sometimes I don’t feel that I am appreciated in England, especially because I don’t ride here any more.
“This seems to be an example of a particular British mentality: build someone up and then just knock ‘em down as quick as you can...Okay, you can say that the only people who turn on you are the idiots but there are a lot of them and they can sometimes get you down a bit.”
So this is what he does: “I’ll search Twitter for ‘Woffinden’ and will see every tweet even when senders don’t tag me in. If they are slating me I’ll click on their profile and I’ll see that they follow me and I block ‘em. Anything negative, I block.”
Woffinden says he then turns it to his advantage, using it as a motivational tool. “These people make me hungry to win... essentially to prove them all wrong.”
He takes on his critics wherever he finds them but his preferred method is from the top of the winners’ podium. A fourth world crown, however, will have to wait.
Injuries have hampered this year’s campaign, and Poland’s brilliant Bartosz Zmarzlik will close in on his first championship if he retains his British Grand Prix title on Saturday.
But that is not a setback that will daunt the strong-willed racer, who has set himself the target of a record-breaking seven world titles. It is safe to say that the world will be hearing a lot more from Tai Woffinden before he is finished.
- Raw Speed by Tai Woffinden (John Blake Publishing) is out on Thursday.
- Tai Woffinden rides in the British Grand Prix at the Principality Stadium, Cardiff, Saturday, 5pm. Live on BT Sport