#WALK4DARCY

Ever since a ‘special project’ in 2016 was mentioned by Steve Brandon (@TheTalkingThumb) on his Twitter feed on January 11, which was closely followed by a number of similar messages from many other people in the speedway world, a lot of people were guessing what it might be. But the world would have to wait as ‘Brando’, as he is commonly known, said he would provide further details at the end of January.

So on Friday 29 January he tweeted; “Okay it’s on  #Walk4Darcy 29 June to 08 July 2016 - 200 miles for @D_Dublu_racing full details on 12.02.2016 the 43rd day of the year!”

Brando followed that tweet with another one on Saturday 30 January; “#WALK4DARCY is on @TheTalkingThumb is walking to Cardiff for the #BRITISHSGP for @D_Dublu_racing – more news on 12.02 (Day 43)”

These tweets drew many comments from people in the speedway world and from other sports people around the globe too. The 2014 & 2015 FIA World RX Champion Petter Solberg tweeted about the project, as did the Greatest Motocross rider to ever ride a bike – Ricky Carmichael.

Jason Crump, Tai Woffinden, Scott Nicholls and Mark Lemon were among the big names in the speedway world to tweet their support and even Steve’s son – Jack – committed to joining his dad on the mammoth walk!

Why King’s Lynn and why Cardiff? Simple. Brando explained; “King’s Lynn was Darcy’s first home track in British speedway and because of what happened in Latvia in 2014, the 2014 British SGP at Cardiff was Darcy’s last appearance in the World Championship.
 
”When I started thinking about the idea of the #WALK4DARCY and looked on the map, the 200 miles between the two stadiums seemed like a nice number and a suitable challenge to raise money for Darcy. I would like to say a huge thank you to Keith ‘Buster’ Chapman at the Adrian Flux Arena for agreeing to allow us to start the walk from his stadium”.
 
“When asked about a fundraising target for the walk, he added; “We are looking to raise a minimum of £20,000.00 for Darcy’s new life, but I hope that by the time we are finished we will have raised more than that.
 
“Darcy has 39,000 plus followers on Twitter alone, and if they all donated £1.00 the maths is simple.”
So how can you donate to the #WALK4DARCY project you may ask?
 
“Once again we looked at Darcy’s iconic race number 43 and decided to incorporate that into the fund rasing. So there will be a page on the justgiving.com website that will go live on 04 June and remain open for 43 days, until 16 July (7 days after the Cardiff SGP), for people to make donations.” Said Steve.

The #WALK4DARCY website, which is currently under construction by Andy Povey at AP Media, will be up and running within the next 10 days and will keep everyone right up to date with the project and where we are, as well as build up to the walk itself at the end of June.
 
A couple of other people deserve a special mention to this point and Brando said; “In addition to the work that Andy is doing on the website, I would like to add a personal thank you to Josh Gudgeon for his help and support for the project so far and to Dave Webb of ‘BEARD’, a Worcester based Design Consultancy, who has created the #WALK4DARCY logo. The logo, based on an Australian road sign, incorporates Darcy’s 2015 anarchy ‘A’ and a pair of shoes for the walk and is what you see here.
 
“I’m really excited and I just hope we can raise as much money for Darcy as possible, it’s a big challenge but I can’t wait to get stuck in and I’m hoping everybody gets behind us.”