The Guardian January 7th 2002
Picture courtesy of Mr M Gingell "The Back Straight, Cottenham" by Janice Gordon. 2002
The fog was so thick that you could barely see the last fence from the grandstand, never mind the three on the far side. But no one grumbled, or asked for a refund, or gave up and left after the first, because simply being there was all that mattered. As they strained to see the field in the Club member's race come round the home turn a few minutes after 11 o'clock they knew that point-to-pointing was about to emerge from a much deeper gloom of its own.
The 2001 pointing season was barely a month old when it joined millions of animals and countless rural livelihoods on the pyre of foot-and-mouth. For many, the blank weekends were a continuing reminder that the disease would not allow them to relax for so much as an hour or two on Sunday afternoons.
Now they trust and pra6y that it has gone, and the new point-to-point season is an important step on the path back to a normal life. Like any pointing track, Cottenham yesterday was little more than a cold, damp field, and in a fairly bleak corner of East Anglia too, where the fog found a way through even the most freshly waxed jackets. The mood, though, was the joy of coming home.
Pointing is jump racing as it used to be, before entrepreneurs and marketing men tacked on all manner of accessories that it doesn't really need. It is gloriously, and defiantly, amateur, something you do for fun, not money.
There may be no money in pointing but the dangers are just as significant as at Cheltenham of Aintree. Perhaps more so, because there are riders and horses of all shades of ability, galvanised by the sort of enthusiasm which prefers to overlook the risks... - Greg Wood, The Guardian, Monday January 7th, 2002