WEEK THAT SHOOK SPORT
Staging of Cheltenham Festival and European matches will forever be shrouded in controversy
EMANATING from a sea of humanity, the Cheltenham Roar greeting the annual Festival’s opening race is among British sport’s great sights and sounds.
If it was slightly muted this year that was barely discernible, but there was a sense that the excitement may have been slightly tempered by anxiety.
The Festival was the centrepiece of a week which shook the country, with the Covid crisis unfolding like a roll of thunder. By the time of the Gold Cup, which took place on Friday, March 13, there was an air about the place of the band playing on the deck of the Titanic.
More than nine months on, the decision to continue with the staging of Cheltenham remains one of the controversies of a sporting year like no other.
The f estival — along with Liverpool’s Champions League match against Atletico Madrid and Rangers’ Europa League home tie with Bayer Leverkusen — has assumed a totemic status, pertaining to the whole government response to the disease. As with many aspects of the crisis, it has attracted its share of conspiracy theories, some assertions in the ensuing months standing up to scrutiny less than others.
Hindsight al l ows us more perspective on a week-long span which began with England uneasily entertaining Wales at Twickenham, the Prime Minister in attendance.
Two central questions arise: should these events have gone ahead with what was known at the time, and to what extent did they exacerbate the crisis?
What can be said with certainty is that events developed that week at a dizzying pace.
On Monday, March 9, the day before t he Festival, Britain recorded only its third victim of the virus. Overnight Larry Ellison, the Oracle billionaire who owns the Indian Wells tennis event in California, cancelled it hours before the start.
Yet it was on the Wednesday, day two of Cheltenham, that UK sporting fixtures began to teeter. Only then did the World Health Organisation declared a pandemic, sending the stock market into a downward tailspin.
The Liverpool match went ahead on the Wednesday, with Rangers playing in front of 47,000 fans at Ibrox the following night, but it was fast becoming clear that the year’s busiest sporting month was about to be halted. On Thursday evening, the Formula One opening Grand Prix in Melbourne was called off, but it was not until the Friday — Gold Cup day — that the cancellations across a myriad of sports became a flood, with Scotland’s Six Nations trip to Wales postponed at 24 hours’ notice.
Nothing has quite struck the same chord, or provoked as much anger, as the bacchanalian festival of horse racing carrying on prior to that.
One reason was undoubtedly the suspicion engendered by the various associations of government figures with the sport, and the assertion that this may have stopped them intervening.
Two well-established examples of this are Baroness Dido Harding, of Track and Trace notoriety, being on the Jockey Club board, and racing enthusiast Health Secretary Matt Hancock being the MP for Newmarket.
There are others, such as the tie-up between Grand National sponsors Randox, the Northern Ireland firm who have won extensive Covid testing contracts and employ Conservative MP Owen Paterson as a consultant.
Throughout, Cheltenham have doggedly insisted that in going ahead they were only following the advice of the government, who in turn maintained that they were following the advice of their scientists.
And an examination of the minutes from SAGE meetings for early March actually suggests that this was indeed the case. At the time the likes of Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance were talking up the benefits of herd immunity.
Dated March 5 the minutes record that ‘SAGE agreed there is no evidence to suggest that banning very large gatherings would reduce transmission’.
Then there is another significant reference from the SAGE meeting on March 13 (Gold Cup day): ‘In our March 4 report we highlighted the risk that applying multiple interventions con currently (including the suspension of public gatherings such as football matches or restrictions of pubs or restaurants) could have complex and unforeseen effects, including the displacement of social activities to other venues. This would require careful management to avoid confrontation or community tension. This point still stands.’
Given that contemporaneous thinking, it would have been bold of Cheltenham to have unilaterally cancelled, especially given the financial self-sabotage.
The Festival is very much the Jockey Club’s golden goose, responsible for more than three quarters of its annual profits. It does have some pandemic insurance — dating back from the 2001 Foot and Mouth crisis — but falls well short of the comprehensive cover enjoyed by Wimbledon.
With hard times ahead there could have been severe knock-on effects for its other racecourse operations, notably among the 17,000 people employed directly by the racing industry and the 85,000 additionally supported.
Like so much to do with debates over Covid policy the whole question also encompasses the emotive lives versus livelihoods debate.
With 150,000 people having been at Cheltenham (a more realistic figure than the usually quoted 251,000 aggregate, due to multiple day tickets), 52,000 having been at Anfield on the Wednesday and 47,000 at Ibrox on the Thursday, there is no doubt that some will have lost their lives as a direct or indirect result of these mass gatherings.
However, exactly how many caught the virus at either can never be known, due to many different factors.
All three events will have attracted fans from far and wide; at the time the virus was spreading rapidly in a host of different settings; there was nothing in the way of mass testing.
In Cheltenham’s aftermath, several high-profile figures reported suffering symptoms after attending. These included footballer Charlie Austin, comedian Lee Mack and Andrew Parker-Bowles, former husband of the Duchess of Cornwall.
Lancashire County Cricket Club Chairman David Hodgkiss, 71, died from Covid-related causes in early April, having attended the Festival.
His tragic passing was one contributing factor to demands for an inquiry into its staging. Another was research from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change which came out later in that month suggesting that 60 per cent of transmissions came from ‘public events’. It is now established that transmission within homes is a much greater factor.
In early April, leaked information to Gloucestershire Live showed that there had been an apparent spike in hospital admissions from the postcode closest to the racecourse.
While punters may come from all over the country, working staff are also drawn from a wide area, although some are l ocal. The thronging of bars and restaurants i n the town, while noticeably less frantic this year, may have contributed more to the spread around the Cheltenham area.
Exact figures cannot be known but there does appear to have been a higher subsequent death toll i n Gloucestershire than neighbouring regions.
However, the county does have an above-average percentage of elderly residents.
Also, the trajectory for hospital deaths where Covid is cited as a related factor in the Gloucestershire Hospitals NHS Foundations Trusts were largely in line with other parts of the country.
Its first death was registered on March 19 and a peak of 14 daily deaths was reached on April 11, within three days of the national
On Gold Cup day sporting cancellations became a flood
peak. One GP in the region who has e xamined t he f i gures described them to Sportsmail as ‘inconclusive’.
More than nine months on, there is still no sign of the inquiry ordered by Liverpool City Council into the circumstances around the Atletico game reporting.
A spokesperson for the Council said this week: ‘As the city’s current focus is very much on dealing with the pandemic, no timescale or date has yet been set for the completion of the work and when it will be reported.’
Scottish Liberal Democrats spokesman Alex Cole-Hamilton said in April that the decision to go ahead with the Europa League clash at Ibrox was something that should be examined at any future public inquiry.
There was little social distancing i n evidence at Cheltenham, although progressively in the week people were, where possible, taking more precautions. Around the parade ring, for example, there are more gaps. In the media area some Irish press departed on the Wednesday night.
On the Friday, sport began to get wiped out. Just after 10am UEFA suspended all Champions League and Europa League games. Five minutes l ater it was announced that England’s cricket tour of Sri Lanka was being abandoned.
Within hours all league football in Scotland and England was postponed; two more F1 races were off as was cycling’s Giro d’Italia, shortly followed by golf ’s Masters; all international tennis was off for six weeks minimum; the f ollowing day’s Wales v
Scotland match also perished. By the end of the afternoon, the London Marathon had gone.
Those of us who had been working at the Festival for four days walked of f i nto t he Cotswolds gloaming j aded, perhaps a tad relieved.
Only three months from now the Festival will return. Sportsmail understands that the Jockey Club is looking at three different crowd scenarios, depending on how events unfold between now and then.
The worst case is for a crowd of 2-3,000, the medium scenario is 10-15,000 and the best case would be for around 25,000 punters to be allowed in.
It is a reminder that the race back to normality, from the week which shook sport, may still have several furlongs left to run.