‘I had a growing sense we shouldn’t be there. People were six deep at the bar’

Despite talk of coronavirus infection spreading in crowds, on 10 March the four-day Cheltenham Festival race meeting went ahead. Telegraph sports writer Alan Tyers was there

Beforehand, it was even money on Cheltenham Festival being cancelled, but racing is a well-connected institution, and ahead it went. I attended the four-day race meeting every day, as I do every year, to cover the fixture for this paper. The mood on the first day was excitement from the punters, and relief from those whose bottom line depends on the event. The attendance over the week was 251,684: just six per cent down on 2019. By the second day, I had a growing sense that maybe we shouldn’t be there.

People crammed six deep at the bars, drunken shouting, singing. If you were going to design a virus dispersion hub, you could do worse than the indoor bits of a packed racecourse. The transgressive feeling was overtaken on day three by a surreal unease. Sports hacks gathered around the press-room TV to watch not race replays, but the PM’S Thursday-night address. The only party politics this lot have heard of is the 1992 Grand National winner, so you knew a serious crisis was looming.

A few months later, epidemiology professor Tim Spector, from King’s College London, concluded Cheltenham had ‘caused increased suffering and death that wouldn’t otherwise have occurred’. There were reports that 37 ‘extra deaths’ happened at hospitals near Cheltenham, compared to similar hospital trusts. Sir David King, the government’s chief scientific adviser from 2000 to 2007, went as far as saying the festival could have accelerated the spread of the virus. ‘These large gatherings have that potential to exacerbate transmission,’ he said.

Despite the foreboding, there was Last Days of Rome defiance, and a realisation this was the last sport for a while. People I spent time with at Cheltenham reckon they had Covid, although you always feel rough after four days of boozing and gambling, don’t you?

So did Cheltenham help spread it? That is a racing certainty.