‘If you wanted to design a virus dispersion hub, you could do worse’: the Cheltenham Festival, one year on
When the roar of 65,000 people greeted the first race of the third day, at 1.30pm on Thursday 12 March last year, Geoff Bodman was feeling just fine. The 56-year-old painter and decorator from Tremorfa in Cardiff, whose friends call him “Boddie”, had been going to the Cheltenham Festival every year for 25 years. He had paid £30 for a ticket to the affordable
Best Mate enclosure, where he planned to have a punt on the horses and a day on the beer. The following morning he’d be back in Cardiff, getting on with a job painting the outside of a house.
The week before, Bodman and his wife Julie, who worked in a Cardiff care home, had cancelled their second wedding anniversary trip to Venice. They had been looking forward to it for months, but Italy had become a hot spot for the new coronavirus. “We didn’t want to take the risk. We lost money because easyJet wouldn’t repay us, but we played safe. We thought it wasn’t that bad in Britain.” According to
government figures, there were 1,302 confirmed cases of Covid across the UK by 11 March;
data from the Office for National Statistics later revealed that there had been 26 Covid deaths.
Bodman and five friends left Cardiff early on 12 March, stopping at a pub on arrival at Cheltenham Spa train station. “It was jam-packed,” he says. “But I was reassured by the racecourse. They’d done their best. There were plenty of signs and hand-washing stations.” It was, he says, much better than it had been when he was at Twickenham a week earlier, when
England played Wales in front of thousands of rugby fans,
including Boris Johnson and his fiancee Carrie Symonds.
Meanwhile, Rob Knowles, a building contractor from Lichfield in Staffordshire, was also on his way to Cheltenham, by minibus, and half expecting the races to be cancelled. Images of the dead and dying in Italian hospitals, and
reports that Germany, France, Japan and Spain had now closed schools and banned sports, had scared him. The UK government was advising people to wash their hands and catch coughs in a handkerchief; three days earlier, the
prime minister had said, “As things stand… the best thing we can all do is wash our hands for 20 seconds with soap and water.”
“We were going as guests of another company, and on the Friday it was our turn to be hosts,” Knowles says. “It was the only hospitality we would do all year, so it was important. I emailed the group we were taking to say we would quite understand if anyone wanted to pull out because of Covid-19. But only one person cried off.”
Christine James (not her real name), a 19-year-old student at a university in the Midlands, had been at the racecourse since 9am on day two, Wednesday 11 March, serving in a pop-up pub overlooking the last fence. The place was full of parties of 10 or more people, and by 11am she was shocked by the size of the crowds. “They were six deep at the bar,” she says. “No one was paying any attention to Covid. I was worried but I just put it out of my mind. In retrospect, it was crazy.”
You can read the rest of the story in the link, the whole things is
some people scared of the vaccine, these hoes want that siht bad AF
