Irresponsible, selfish, greedy, stupid. Some of the labels used on Irish social and general media to describe those who travelled to Cheltenham last week.

Nearly everyone agrees now that the Cheltenham Festival shouldn’t have gone ahead but now is a lot different than the weekend before when the meeting could have been called off.

You can understand the frustration of people at home viewing Cheltenham through social media videos and pictures. It depicted those who travelled as having no recollection of the true seriousness of what was going on in the world. But maybe that was because they actually didn’t.

Any racing fan who has gone to Cheltenham knows how it can be this all-consuming cocoon. We talk about it the day after it finishes for the next 361 days until it goes ahead again.

Couple that with the fact that the host country’s government seemed to have a completely different attitude to the spread of Covid-19 than ours. While a large amount of pubs and restaurants voluntarily shut their doors in this country yesterday, British schools remained open this morning.

Reasonable

I didn’t attend Cheltenham this year but for those that did, was it not a reasonable course of action to trust the British government and the organisers of the meeting to make the right and safe decision about racing going ahead?

“I think the attitude over there was different to back home,” said Meath racegoer Donal O’Brien, who attended all four days of the meeting.

“Last weekend, I actually couldn’t see the Festival going ahead, the way the situation was developing here but once I saw the Manchester Derby go ahead on the Sunday, with 70-odd thousand in Old Trafford, I knew it would go ahead.

“I meet a lot of Irish people there every year and I think largely, Irish people there were taking the safety protocols seriously, not shaking hands and using the sanitiser stations. I don’t think that was the case for the British. I don’t think they were worried at all.

Regarding the reaction to Irish Cheltenham racegoers, O’Brien added: “I saw a few things on social media during the week and it made me stop looking at it. No one has said anything to me directly since I’ve come home but I have sensed that sort of negative feeling.

“I’m self isolating now, as instructed, by working at home for two weeks and we’ve set up a WhatsApp group with 10 people who I was with regularly over at Cheltenham, just to be to alert everyone if anything happens to any of us.

“I don’t have any regrets about going, I think it was the right decision at the time.”

Many Irish returning from Cheltenham have reported an uneasy feeling coming back home, following criticism online and in the media. Dublin racegoer and popular racing vlogger Andrew Blair White attended the Festival and said: “I think the whole thing has genuinely been overplayed and the reception for us (Irish returning from Cheltenham) coming home seems ridiculously hostile given, I’m sure, there were plenty of Irish at Anfield (Liverpool Champions League fixture) on Wednesday night. It’s slightly double standards for racing folk in my opinion.”

Another Festival attendee, who preferred to be unnamed, told me: “It was strange to come home on the Saturday, after being in a racing bubble and coming off a massive high, to be told I can't work for a week or see my missus in the same time period and told to self-isolate myself.

Thinking of it now, maybe the British government massively underplayed this whole thing, and didn't follow precautions that they should have.

“Thinking of it now, maybe the British government massively underplayed this whole thing, and didn't follow precautions that they should have. I haven't left my house or talked to anybody to gauge a reaction of whether me going to Cheltenham in the first place will have a bad reaction, but there was no prior warning when I left on Monday from either government.

“I don't know anybody who didn't go over because of the virus. We trusted the authorities who chose to go ahead with the meeting, and now we've landed in a s**t storm, and from what I've heard on the radio and see on Twitter, a lot of people saying anyone who went to Cheltenham was selfish, and I think that's so wide of the mark it’s unfair, and quite hurtful, to be honest.”

Swerve

It’s worth noting that a few Irish racegoers did swerve Cheltenham late in the day and a few racing journalists did come home during the week. Giving up work commitments or calling your holiday off is a responsible call, but it’s a big call whatever way you look at it, considering that the British government saw fit to let Cheltenham and other major sporting events go ahead last week. It was only on Friday that the Premier League called a halt to its fixtures, and that was due to the concerns over the health of the players and officials, rather than primarily as a public health measure.

Racing has enough outside criticisms to deal with and it’s hoped that the Cheltenham Festival, a shop window for National Hunt racing, doesn’t have its reputation tarnished through this.

BUY THE IRISH FIELD THIS WEEKEND FOR THE LATEST INFORMATION ABOUT THE CORONAVIRUS OUTBREAK AND ITS EFFECT ON THE EQUINE INDUSTRIES AND A IN-DEPTH REVIEW OF THE CHELTENHAM FESTIVAL