Alec Lochore is the founder of Musketeer Event Management, he organises Burnham, Houghton and Cholmondeley Castle Horse Trials, has stints on the board of British Eventing and as chairman of BE’s National Safety Committee, as well as course designing, being an FEI Technical Delegate, Director of the Blair Castle Horse Trials in Scotland, and now he has taken on the role of Eventing Manager for the London 2012 Olympic Games. Check out part 1 of my interview with Alec on Monday and here is part 2 of our interview.
Next year, of course, if you can’t make it in person, there’ll be a full crew of television cameras filming every conceivable angle at as many jumps as possible, bringing the world the complete Greenwich experience, and the photos alone that have already been generated from the Test Event have proven how valuable the venue is in generating publicity for Equestrianism.
“There are some properly iconic images; even internally on our internet the main screen saver now is actually Pippa Funnell jumping the fence as they go down the hill with Canary Wharf and the City in the background. It’s just a fantastic image, and it’s the sort of shot you can get in papers all over the world, and that’s what we’re trying to do, and that’s why we’re where we are. That’s why Greenwich is having the equestrian because we’re right in the middle of the city. I know that last time we were in the middle of Hong Kong, but we weren’t really – we did the dressage and show-jumping at Sha-Tin and that wasn’t really in the middle of the city, and then we went half an hour/forty minutes up the road to the cross country and back again. This time it’s all happening right here. It’s nine minutes from Greenwich to London Bridge Station and you can’t get more in the middle of London than that!”
Pippa Funnell and Billy Shannon
I asked Alec if being Eventing Manager for the Olympics was much different to running Musketeer Management, and he burst out laughing, and told me it was almost impossible to compare,
“Here (LOCOG) you’ve got an enormous team of people you can rely on, whereas in the day-to-day running of Musketeer I’ve got Di and Gemma in the South, and Hannah in the office in the North. In the Olympics we don’t have to worry about tradestands particularly or sponsors greatly, because there are no tradestands and sponsors are above our pay station. Here if I worry about transport and how that’s going to work, there’s a Transport Department so what I’m able to do is concentrate the sport. That means that my job here, under the leadership of Tim, is to coordinate with all these other Departments – Transport, Accreditation, Ticketing, Logistics, it goes on and on and on, it’s more about coordination than management. Whereas at a normal event you have to set up the traffic management system and tell the car parking guys how to do it, you’ve got to set up the tradestands, you’ve got to decide how much the tickets are going to cost, what paper to print them on, who’s going to collect them…you’ve just got to do everything, whereas here I just concentrate on building a really good team that can deliver the sport, and then coordinate with all the other people to in order to make sure that the sport gets what it needs. The other departments and the General Manager are at pains to point out that we all remember we’re here because of sport; the role of the other area departments is to support and work around sport, which is great, and I suppose the massive, fundamental difference. I’m here to only concentrate on one aspect of an event, and coordinate with other aspects, rather than coordinate all aspects and ensure sport!”
“Here in sport we are a small team of four coordinating all aspects. Sophie Attwood who is the Services Manager and Stephen Renouard who is the Dressage and Show Jumping Manager, and I feel as a team under Tim we have a strong and positive working team, who work well as a team”
“It’s completely different, but that’s not to say that the skill sets I’ve developed over the years aren’t valuable, because they are, and it would be absolutely right to suggest that I’ll come out with a better understanding and more skill sets having left the organisation.”
Alec taking care of details at Houghton last year
So although it sounds like he plenty of authority, he actually has less control over the details, and I wondered if that was was hard for him to let go?
“I think that was probably something that I struggled with to start with. In the past when I’ve had to make a decision I never really dwelt on the consequences that it may have on another department because normally if there were consequences and I’d forgotten to tell someone, then it was just tough because it was my fault. Now, something as simple as for example, you get three or four withdrawals and so the dressage might end twenty-five or thirty minutes earlier, and I forget to tell anybody – all of a sudden the grandstands empty twenty-five minutes earlier and Event Services have been planning for a mass evacuation for maybe half-past two, and it’s all happened at two-o-clock. I have to be much more aware of the decisions that I make, and the impact that they may have on others. Sometimes that brings pressure. Sometimes it’s hard to understand the logic of what one department is saying you have to do, and you know it’s not the way that you would ordinarily do it, but you also have to realise that there’s twenty-six other sports in the Games, and you’re only one of them, and this is the same in Rowing and Badminton and Tae Kwando as it is in Equestrian, and the reason it’s being done like this is because that model fits others. You have to accept it, and put your faith in the system.”
Alec will be at Cholmondeley Castle and Blair later this summer, but in a working capacity. When I asked him if he gets to enjoy any events at all anymore, he did have to ponder it for a few seconds!
“Of course, I enjoy them all because if I didn’t then I wouldn’t bother going! I did a few hours work at Badminton but the benefits are it’s work without pressure, I had no responsibility, and that’s different. I’m not responsible if someone falls off, or if the hot water breaks down, or if showers don’t work and the loos get blocked! I’ll go to Burghley and I’m sure I’ll do something there but it will certainly be more relaxed, I’ll have time to go and look at the tradestands, which I hate, because I hate shopping, because I’m such a mean Scot!” (Alec cracks up laughing!).
A Scot, and self-confessed country life lover, who now finds himself living solo in the city during the week; I ask him how it agrees with him, or perhaps not?
“It’s making me fatter because I spend a lot of time sitting in a chair and eating an awful lot and not very much time taking any exercise! It’s just over three hours door to door from home for me, so I come in on a monday morning and I’m out on a friday night. One of the really interesting things about the environment in which we work is people come from all walks of life, from all over the world, quite literally. In our team we’ve got Australians, New Zealanders, British, Greek, French, Swiss….and those are just the people I can see from where I am right now. It’s a very diverse body of people yet all completely united in a common goal. I was lucky enough to be an NTO under Tim Hadaway at a previous Games, some people have never been involved before at all, quite a lot of the people go from Games to Games to Games, or they do a Summer Games, Winter Games, Summer Games, depending on their contract, or their particular area of expertise. Some people will even fit in a football or rugby World Cup in between all that! There’s a lot of people here who are very experienced in the Games time scenario, and some have done quite a number, and some have done one or two. It’s great fun, I go and play hockey every second or third week with the local hockey team, and there’s a touch rugby team so there’s plenty going on, you’ve just to get out and do it, and not sit behind your desk all the time.”
Meanwhile, Emily is equally busy at home in Norfolk with the two boys and eventing,
“She’s got quite a few youngsters on the go at the moment, some nice intermediate horses. It’s just that perennial problem of her trying to find one good one that stays sound long enough for her to get to the top, particularly when you’re doing it on a relatively limited budget, juggling it with the kids, and she teaches four or five lessons a day, and she rides four or five a day as well. She’s a pretty good workaholic herself, so in lots of ways our lives haven’t changed; the only difference is I now come home at weekends and that’s when she’s off to an event! ”
I managed to catch Alec’s speech to the Horse Trials Support Group at Badminton in the Spring, and although he professed to being nervous, you’d never have known it, and he won the crowd over in minutes. Energetic, engaging, and great fun, I almost can’t imagine him living a “normal” life now, and ask him what he’ll do on 1st August next year when the Games are over – will he return to the helm of Musketeer?
“We’ll have to see about that. It’s going to keep running; I haven’t built it up over ten years and spent the time, money and commitment with the girls to let it go, so it definitely will continue. It might be that I operate it in a slightly different manner if I’ve got the confidence to leave them to get on with it, and I’ve got no reason to believe that I wouldn’t have. I might have a slightly different role – I might not paint quite as many white stakes as I once did! It will definitely carry on, and I don’t know what opportunities will spring out of this, the Games, I still enjoy designing courses, I still enjoy being a TD so hopefully I’ll get opportunities to do some more of that.”
I’m hoping his travels will perhaps include Kentucky and North America, and he divulges that Adelaide is the only remaining major event that he has yet to attend, so maybe he’ll be taking a trip down under once the Olympics wrap up. I have to admit I share his dream for British Gold next year, and I think the 2010 Olympic Eventing is in good hands. I’d like to thank Alec for his time, and thank you reading. GO GB, and Go Eventing!
