Hello? Indy 500?

Is it just me, or did the Indy 500 generate very little press this year? I admit that I don’t watch TV or read the paper, so if there has been coverage on there I’ve missed it. But this is nothing new, and I had always noticed coverage on the places and sites where I do go.

Has the whole thing fallen off the map? I think the non-racing press is uninterested because there are no gay drivers, and no gender or ethnicity issues to exploit.

I know this is the one event that I’m parking myself on the sofa to see, green to checkered (naps allowed).

I don’t really have a favorite driver, but it would be cool to see JR Hilderbrand get the monkey off his back from the near miss a few years ago. Gotta like the whole Ed Carpenter, a home town hero from Indy, story angle too.

Unfortunately the traditional media has all but disappeared. Newspapers are now almost exclusively reliant on wire services for large scale sports. The only stories with by-lines are usually local in nature, and do not include your local track. It would take a fatality or serious injuries to get a story about OSW in the Sentinel. With the death of NSSN as we knew it(weekly) there just isn’t any non-electric source of news. I guess with the proliferation of pre-cooked foods, fast food chains and frozen foods it will negate the need for mullet wrappers and newspapers will simply go away. God forbid you live in a college town as I do, if it isn’t round, oblong and doesn’t bounce or roll it simply isn’t in the paper.

[B][I]I think that in general, our beloved sport has been put aside for more adrenalin pumping extreme events of today.

People throw themselves off of 25,000 feet high space balloon, or off 10,000 + feet cliff somewhere in the world and fly to the bottom of the earth, they back flip in snowmobile, they jump or walk over the Grand Canyon, they lay down on a wheeled plank and roll down a hill at XX MPH on the Rd of California, or Peru, wherever it is. They burn tires by the dozen drifting in Unlimited motor rides, they throw themselves off flying helicopter on the side of snowy mountains and ski down the bumpy…very bumpy slope. And we could go on and on and on. So oval racing, open wheel or full fender is not really up the game against those new sporting events as far as the younger are concerned. And if it does not attract the young, it does not attract medias attention.[/I][/B]