Opinion

Editor’s note: The following column appeared in last weekend’s print edition of The Irish Field, recapping Sean’s trip to the 2020 Cheltenham Festival, complete with his annual “Letters From America.”  

“You can’t live your life in fear.” That’s what I said as I packed my wool suits, my Cheltenham overcoat, my camera, my stashed British pounds, my press pass and left for England. I repeated that mantra until it weakened, until it lost its levity. It began to sound trite, flippant, ridiculously out of touch.

You can’t live your life in fear, that’s what I said last week and repeated many times this week. A week ago, I left for Cheltenham, the coronavirus, at the time, was a concern, a hassle, a nuisance. Or so we thought…or so I thought. I left without fear, trepidation, sure, but not fear. In what has felt like a very short and very long week, the heat has been turned up, a virus on the rise, the world is a strange place.

As stocks crash and a virus rises, the horses stabilize. Samcro and Melon and Faugheen. Min and Saint Calvados. Lisnagar Oscar, well, he scored at 50-1, it wasn’t exactly a mooring in the storm, but it was brilliance. Three days down, one to go. The Festival. The glorious, mercurial, thrilling Cheltenham Festival.

Nothing like waking up and reading the headline, “Travel restricted from Europe for 30 days.” In the fine print, it explained that the ban doesn’t include the UK. Hopefully, I can still slide under the tag. Daunting, fragile, uncertain times in which we live.