All of these fabulous photos used with kind permission of the one and only Nico Morgan.
As the founder of Musketeer Event Management, organising Burnham, Houghton and Cholmondeley Castle Horse Trials, stints on the board of British Eventing and 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 married to his beautiful wife, Emily with two young boys (phew!) – one might think Alec Lochore had enough on his plate to keep him busy, and drive most normal people insane. It was about a year ago now though, that he was offered the position of Eventing Manager for the London 2012 Olympic Games, and the unique opportunity, he told me, was just too fantastic to turn down,
Luckily Alec admits he thrives on pressure, “most of the time”, although, “every now and then I’d like it to relent so I can take a breath.” There will probably be scant chance of that happening with about a year to go until the Games now, and less than a year since Alec took the job on,
“I started the beginning of July 2010. It was as little amount of time as we could afford really. One of the problems was that I didn’t actually start full-time until September because I had so many other commitments already on the go, and I think my life would have been a lot easier if I’d been able to start on the day when they said they wanted the job to start, rather than when I said I could! Tim Hadaway, (Olympic Equestrian Manager) was very lenient in that respect and I was given time to go and do what I needed to do – I was TD at Burghley, I was running Blair, so I couldn’t just drop all of that and come immediately.”
Musketeer Event Management does continue regardless,
“I’ve got two and a half full time girls in the office in Norfolk, and one and a half, almost two full time people in the office at Blair, so between them they’re keeping the shows on the road, quite literally. I haven’t made it easy for them – we’ve got a new event which we’ve just started in a fortnight’s time, (Cholmondeley Castle) and we’ve got 560 entries in our first year, which is a very nice position to be in, but it certainly puts the pressure on. We’ve got the European Young Rider Championships at Blair this year; we did all these things and then I buggered off!”
Alec is used to competing at a high level, and I wondered if he’d swapped one adrenaline fix for another?
“It’s different, totally different. Whereas a four star cross country round lasts somewhere between ten or twelve minutes and you have a pretty big buzz after that, and your ego swells, or you rub down your wounds if it hasn’t gone well, this is a two year trip, a two year course if you like, with plenty of challenges along the way. It will be great, but a clear round, the end goal is a gold medal for Britain. Of course, first of all you want everyone to have a safe time, but secondly, let’s be patriotic about it, I want Britain to win! I think if you interviewed Jeremy Edwards, the Venue General Manager, or Stu Baker the Logistics Manager, or whoever it happens to be in the office from a strong eventing nation they’d say they don’t mind who wins, it will be a great Games – as long as it’s Australia, or New Zealand, or…! To me a gold for Britain would be epic: for our sport it would be epic because we’ve got a truly iconic venue, we’ll be one of the first medals that Britain have a chance of winning, it would be on Day 4 of the Games and the publicity and the hype around it would be enormous.”
William Fox-Pitt show-jumping Gaucho at the Olympic Test Event at Greenwich
With the Test Event now completed, I asked Alec if he feels a sense of relief,
“Yes, but it was just that – a Test Event, we tested a lot of things, we ran quite a big event at a brand new site for the first time. The second time we run it will be a huge four star, and it’s not just going to have a million or two people watching it like at our other events, it’s going to have hundreds of millions of people watching from all over the world. It went really well, but there were plenty of challenges; we’ve got pages and pages of de-briefing notes that we’re wading through and speaking to all the Team Leaders, not just the cross-country, but the guys from the Para, the guys from the Dressage and Show-Jumping, as well as the guys from the Modern Pentathlon because obviously we shared the venue with them and they had their World Cup Final there on saturday and sunday. There’s a long way to go; I think we can be pleased with how far we’ve got and what we’ve done to this point but it wasn’t the finished article and nor should we have expected it to be, because that would have been completely unrealistic.”
Alec did admit though that he was pleased to have won over many of the doubters,
“What we’ve managed to do is we’ve managed to show the equestrian world, almost without exception that Greenwich can work – I can’t think of anyone who didn’t come, and we had a lot of people here, particularly on the cross country day because the British Equestrian Federation were able to give a way a lot of tickets, – we were able to convince people who’d admitted to previously being somewhat sceptical and dubious, and they are now completely converted, they told me they absolutely get it, that now they understand what we’re doing and why we’re here.”
“There were certainly some doubters, and what was interesting was that anybody who was, has always been converted pretty nearly immediately once they’ve been to the venue and understood the philosophy. There was a very interesting letter written to the Chairman, Lord Coe, that we’ve been kindly sent, I can’t say who wrote it but somebody who’d been a big doubter, and he said that having been to the Test Event he now really understands that Legacy comes in two forms: the hard, concrete kind, literally – buildings and infrastructure that you can leave behind, but also you have sporting legacy where you’re bringing something to people who’ve never experienced it before. He wrote that having been quite a fierce critic of Greenwich before, he was now totally convinced. I think it’s easy to complain, but it takes a real man to write to the Chairman, at the highest level, and admit that you’ve got it wrong for the last four or five years.”
“It wasn’t everybody who needed convincing though, some people got it straight away. I went to the venue on one of the tours just out of interest that Tim (Hadaway) did way back, when he first go the job. Having been to Hong Kong and Sydney I went with a completely open mind, and I could see quite well that it was a nice idea, and then when I got there I could see why it was an even better idea! A lot of the time when you used to hear people being very negative about the site, it was because they’d never been there, and they hadn’t tried to understand why it is where it is. We do feel vindicated, definitely, but you can’t please all the people all the time! There will always be one or two people who aren’t happy, and they’ll be the one’s who get publicised now because it’s the minority view, and otherwise it gets boring to hear people say it’s brilliant!”
Waylon Roberts and Blockbuster III
Although Alec himself was fully supportive of Greenwich, he told me the Test Event was pretty special,
“There was an extraordinary atmosphere, the likes of which I’ve never seen, or felt, or been part of before, and I’ve been to most of the big events in the world now. Greenwich Council also gave away thousands of tickets on cross country day, and they gave an awful lot of them to the schools so we had all these schoolchildren and it was completely surreal – we had quite a lot of these poor, younger, two star horses galloping down to the water jump with this absolute cauldron of noise and cheering, and it was going on in the show-jumping as well, you could see their eyes out on stalks and they were thinking, ‘what on earth is this? I’ve never seen anything like this in my life?’ In the end though, it was really positive. It was just such a fantastic day; we had lovely weather, we had fantastic competition, we had some of the world’s best riders – Michael Jung went out first and William Fox-Pitt was about sixth, and it just went on and on and on – if you think that we had the first three on the podium from last year’s World Games and four of the top five from the last Europeans, that’s how high quality the field was. These guys were watching some of the best exponents of horse-riding, full stop, in the world, and it was just a fantastic atmosphere, it was carnival! It was extraordinary, and the riders all commented on how electric it all felt.”
