The man in charge of one of Scotland’s largest annual events has expressed his frustration at the lack of attention paid to a gathering which will attract some of this weekend’s biggest sporting crowds.
Alec Lochore, the event director of the Blair Castle Equi-trek International Horse Trials which will see around 10,000 people squeeze into the little Perthshire town of Blair Atholl on each of four days of competition.
However he knows that even the most minor senior football matches will receive more attention in the majority of the mainstream media.
“That’s what frustrates me more than anything else. If we were suddenly going crazy about the gymnastics, which we had when we hosted the World Championships next year in Glasgow it would be different but I do get frustrated,” he said.
“I’m a sports fan across the spectrum completely, football included, but it does become a bit galling when you know the attendance at some football match was about three hundred and seventy five and they do a football report for about a minute and a half on the radio and we’ve got the world’s elite here there were 40,000 here.”
The former three-day-eventer, who competed professionally for more than 20 years, acknowledged that the event’s one off status means it has a different status to sports that are played week-in, week-out for large parts of the year. However he suggested that there should be wider appreciation of the nature of this high class competition, not least given the accessibility of the leading competitors.
“This is a great sporting spectacle and it’s like golf I think because you only have a small piece of string separating you from a horse galloping at 35 mph and you can stand, but where it differs from golf is that you can get a cup of coffee or something to eat standing beside the world number one,” he observed.
“One of the great riders, Blyth Tait, just walked past who has won two individual world championships and an individual Olympic gold medal, just walked past while we were talking. He’s just wandering about in amongst everybody.
“There are 1800 horses here over the four days, from pony club people to people who have just nipped back from Rio last week. You have the full spectrum of people here.”
Lochore, who has also taken on the role of course designer for the cross country section of the three day event competitions, setting a challenging lay-out over a beautiful stretch of countryside, suggested that failing to raise awareness of the nature events such as this means an opportunity is being missed to capitalise on Britain’s Olympic medal success.
“One of the really great things about the Olympic Games is that it brings all of the different sports together. You don’t need to know about gymnastics or trampolining or swimming or cycling or equestrian or whatever it is. You’re just supporting it and you learn and you listen and in Britain we’ve got two Olympic gold medals out of the three different disciplines (dressage and show-jumping),” he noted.
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