Blood, sweat and tears to facilitate the resumption of point-to-pointing

This year has been a truly memorable one for me for so many reasons. Coronavirus has been the most overwhelming influence, but I also became chairman of the Point-to-Point Secretaries' Association (PPSA).

It was an incredible honour to be selected by the committee and to work with all fixture and area secretaries, all of whom are volunteers. Everyone has had to work enormously hard this year planning, Zooming and working with endless amounts of paperwork and protocols.

My background in rules racing, having been at Stratford racecourse now for more than 20 years, has helped me. As soon as we entered lockdown in March, we started preparing for a return to rules racing as soon as possible. Stratford was fortunate in that we were permitted to start again in July. We quickly mastered a whole new set of regulations and guidelines, and it quickly became apparent that the point-to-pointing world would need to mirror these if we wanted to start racing again in October.