Cheltenham revisited
Last year’s festival farce has left bitter aftertaste
ON MONDAY, March 9, 2020, Boris Johnson held a press conference at 10 Downing Street. He reported that four people were, to that point, dead in the UK as a result of Covid-19. But subsequent studies estimate that the true figure was a multiple of that; one subsequently calculated that by March 11, there were over 1,300 cases and 26 fatalities.
But on that Monday, Johnson was still in characteristically blustering form, the attitude that is his default public position – but one that also meant the UK was weeks behind many other countries in imposing restrictions to protect the public. The success his government is currently enjoying with its rapid vaccination programme is helping to dull the memory of its ghastly ineptitude a year ago, but any recollection of the disastrous Cheltenham Festival of 2020 involves immersion in the political climate of the UK at that time.
While the rest of Europe was locking down, Johnson’s sombre take at that press briefing at Downing Street on March 9 was that ‘as things stand I’m afraid it bears repeating that the best thing we can all do is wash our hands for 20 seconds with soap and water’.
This was in keeping with his comments from six days earlier that became notorious, following his visit to a hospital.
‘I was at a hospital the other night where I think there were a few coronavirus patients and I shook hands with everybody, you will be pleased to know, and I continue to shake hands,’ he boasted.
Any consideration of the fateful decision to press ahead with the Cheltenham Festival cannot be separated from the wider political environment. That is not to absolve organisers or the British Horseracing Association of responsibility, but eagerness within the racing industry to press ahead with the lucrative Festival was merely reflecting the determination of the British government to proceed with life as normal, even as the pandemic shut down swathes of the world.
Racing in the UK is an industry with traditionally close ties to the Conservative Party, and after Johnson won an 80-seat majority in the general election of December 2019, the BHA issued a statement welcoming ‘the clarity which the general election result, and a majority Conservative government, provides for our industry particularly relating to Brexit’. Both Labour and the Liberal Democrats had raised issues around the welfare of horses in the industry in their manifestos for that election.
With Johnson winning by a landslide, British racing had a supporter in Downing Street.
And the manner in which Johnson and his cabinet behaved during that week reinforced that fact.
The Festival started the day after Johnson gave that tin-eared press conference at No10, on Tuesday March 10; two days later, Leo Varadkar shut childcare facilities, schools and colleges in this country. Sporting organisations followed, with the GAA, FAI, and IRFU suspending all action later that day.
Also at that time, Italy, on the verge of harrowing weeks of death and suffering, shut all shops except food stores and pharmacies.
Scotland’s First Minister, Nicola Sturgeon, called for any gathering exceeding 500 people to be cancelled.
Germany closed its schools that week, too. It would be almost another two weeks, on March 23, before Johnson shut schools.
Cheltenham was not the only sporting outlier that week; Liverpool played Atletico Madrid in the Champions League at Anfield on March 12, with over 3,000 fans visiting from Madrid, which at the time had registered thousands of positive cases of Covid-19.
But Cheltenham, held across four days and with in excess of 250,000 fans attending across those days, became notorious.
The bullishness of organisers was part of it. And it resonated in this country not merely because of Cheltenham’s huge popularity here, but because 20,000 Irish people attended the Festival last year, travelling even as the scale of the threat from Covid-19 became apparent.
It infuriated people, and it still does.
Yet the support of the British government was pivotal.
Festival organisers wrote to Cheltenham council and cited Johnson’s conduct specifically as part of their rationale for proceeding.
The prime minister had attended the England-Wales match in Twickenham on March 7, three days before the Festival started.
‘As with events from England v Wales attended by the Prime Minister at Twickenham on Saturday to 10 Premier League games around the country this weekend, the government guidance is for the business of the country to continue as usual, while ensuring we adhere to and promote the latest public health advice.’
The Premier League season, along with the rest of professional soccer in England, was shut down on March 13, the final day of the Festival.
Germany and Spain called off theirs at the same time, while the Masters was postponed.
The gravity of the crisis manifested itself in many ways, most coldly tens of thousands of deaths. In the sporting dimension, the quick and prompt action of organisers in many major events in postponing or cancelling their set-pieces was illustrative of not only the depth of the crisis, but how easily its profound implications were to be grasped.
Well, in most cases. Footage of cheering fans and heaving masses seeing out the ill-fated Festival grew more and more unsettling as the week wore on.
Oliver Dowden, the British culture secretary, insisted regarding Cheltenham that ‘there’s no reason for people not to attend such events or to cancel them at this stage’.
Professor Tim Spector, who led a project tracking Covid-19 infection rates said Cheltenham, along with the Liverpool-Atletico Madrid Champions League game, meant ‘people will have probably died prematurely’.
In the months since, organisers of Cheltenham and others in the British racing industry have repeated government support as one of the main reasons for proceeding.
There was no explicit public health advice prohibiting it, either, but even at the time, boasts about the proliferation of hand sanitisers around the racecourse sounded ridiculous.
A year on, and the furious, instant reaction of British racing authorities to the Gordon Elliott controversy was informed by skittishness around racing’s reputation as well as the ill-advised decision of the trainer to pose on a dead horse.
If there is no good time for one of the leading trainers in these islands to become embroiled in such a story, then a fortnight before Cheltenham was a particularly bad time.
That helps to explain the decision of the BHA to prevent Elliott from running horses last week before the Irish Horseracing Regulatory Board had conducted its investigation. Elliott had no runners entered in UK races last week anyway, but this was about being seen to make a stand and the proximity of Cheltenham is likely to have been a factor in that posture.
That this year’s Festival is taking place behind closed doors is a disaster for the Jockey Club, which owns the course, but allows another year’s distance to be put between the event and the images of packed stands and milling spectators that proliferated a year ago.
Cheltenham will also benefit from the general success in which racing has returned in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
Strict measures have been applied and generally seen to work.
The Irish context is important here, too, given that anger within this country caused by the Festival centred on those who crossed the Irish Sea to attend, despite the clear and publicised risks associated with gatherings and travel that were in the public domain by then.
It has not appeared to affect the
‘20,000 IRISH WENT OVER, EVEN AS THE SCALE OF THE CRISIS HIT HOME’