Coronavirus shutdown - the effects on training regimes, racing staff wellbeing and how the racing industry adapts to change
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By Alysen Miller
“Business as Usual”: How the Racing Community Learned to Thrive in a Pandemic, and What We Can Teach the Rest of the World
As the coronavirus blazed its pestilential path across the world, altering virtually every aspect of life as we know it, in a quiet corner of northern France it was business as usual. Every morning, accompanied by the sound of birdsong from the surrounding Chantilly Forest and unperturbed by the cacophony of confusion emanating from the corridors of power, 50 kilometres away in Paris, Nicolas Clément put his string through their paces on the gallops of Les Aigles and Les Lions. “The truth is we had to keep the horses ticking over,” he explains. “We did a bit less, obviously, when there was no visibility [about when racing would resume]. I had more time in the afternoon to look at my horses and stuff. But I didn’t change much, to be honest. Because your routine is your work.”
Nicolas Clément
It’s an attitude that is replicated from Newmarket to Norway. In fact, wherever racehorses are trained, European trainers have stoically gone about their business, even as the magnitude of the moment seemed to take on ever-more alarming new contours. Even as London’s Excel Centre was being converted into a field hospital and graves were being dug in trenches in New York City, racehorses still had to be exercised.
Doncaster’s COVID-19 screening process.
It’s a sentiment that is echoed, in virtually identical terms, by Oslo-based Are Hyldmo. “The daily routine hasn’t really changed that much at all,” he says. “Of course, we have had to be a bit more strict about who comes to the stables. I will allow owners to come but not in big groups. We have policies about washing your hands. We’ve used more hand soap in the last few weeks,” he deadpans, with typical Scandinavian understatement.
“I’m not one of the worriers,” chirps fellow Scandinavian Jessica Long from her yard in Malmö. “It’s not just going to go away, so we’ve got to cope with it. The world can’t stop.” The Nordic neighbours couldn’t be more different in terms of their respective responses to the virus: Norway has been praised for its swift and decisive COVID-19 response, announcing a nationwide lockdown on 12th of March that saw the closure of schools and businesses and a ban on sporting events. Sweden, meanwhile, is something of an outlier in its apparently more casual approach to managing the outbreak. Yet the experiences of the two trainers are remarkably similar. “For us it’s been pretty much business as usual,” confirms Long, repeating the trainers’ mantra.
Dr Antonis Kousoulis
All this is not to downplay the seriousness of the pandemic which, at time of writing, has infected nearly 5 million people and resulted in 324,000 deaths, according to the World Health Organisation. For many, the pathogen itself is only the tip of the iceberg. Millions of adults have reported feeling panicked, afraid and unprepared as a result of the pandemic, according to research from the Mental Health Foundation, a UK-based charity; while almost a quarter of adults living under lockdown have experienced loneliness. “The impact… on mental health can be very hard to manage,” warns Dr Antonis Kousoulis, director at the Mental Health Foundation, in the report. “We fear that we may be living with the mental health impacts of the coronavirus situation for many years to come.”
Yet the racing community has singularly maintained its sense of stoicism—even humour—even in our darkest hours. Now, as the first virulent wave breaks and rolls back and countries across the continent begin to take their first tentative steps out of lockdown, it is worth examining how, as a cohort, the racing community was able to survive and even thrive during one of the most extraordinary periods of human history, and what lessons we might be able to impart to the rest of the world.
“Racing people are incredibly resilient, that’s for sure,” says psychologist Michael Caulfield. “They’ve coped and adapted with extraordinary resilience, and they’ve done it their way. And everyone has found their own rhythm.”
One of the UK’s leading performance psychologists, Caulfield, works with a number of prominent football, cricket and rugby teams, as well as providing support to individual athletes and coaches. Even compared to other sportspeople, he says, the racing world has seemed to weather the storm far better than most. (In a previous life, Caulfield worked as a stable lad and, later, as chief executive of the Professional Jockeys Association; so he knows whereof he speaks.) The reason for this resilience, he suggests, is that racing people are inherently a species of risk-takers: “The racing world has always lived with risk. And I think with this situation now, we’re having to teach the world to learn to live with risk again because risk is a part of everyday life. With horses, it’s a part of every hour of your life; financially, in terms of the risk of injury, in terms of the uncertainty. So racing people are better equipped to deal with it than most.” Caulfield acknowledges that some of the restrictions imposed by lockdown, such as not being able to go to the pub with your mates, have perhaps been easier on people who didn’t have a social life to begin with: “How many people from equestrianism do you meet during the week for a night out? You don’t.” …
