Crisis upon crisis - but one innovative racecourse has managed to rise above it

This was supposed to be the year of economic bounceback, with the unwinding of Covid-19 restrictions leading to an avalanche of consumer spending held back for the best part of two years.

A day at the races was surely going to be high on the wishlist of anyone who had previously been a fan of the sport and who had spent so long largely prevented from doing much of anything that related to normal life.

It was almost impossible to imagine how the world was going to very quickly change from the vantage point of January 2020 for all but a tiny number of specialist virologists. The pool of people well enough versed in both macro-economics and Kremlinology to foresee where we are now from back in January 2022 must also be vanishingly small.