France Clear to Resume Racing After Government Sign-Off

French racing will resume as planned May 11 at three tracks, including ParisLongchamp, but only after a tense 24 hours of negotiation to avert a potentially heartbreaking change of tack from the government.

France Galop president Edouard de Rothschild announced via Twitter in the early hours of Saturday morning that the green light had been given by President Emmanuel Macron for a resumption that, for most of Friday, had looked to be slipping out of reach.

In the tweet, Rothschild thanked Macron, his prime minister, and minister of agriculture, as well as two key intermediaries, former presidential candidate Francois Bayrou and the mayor of Deauville, Philippe Augier.

Rothschild said: "This was a race I wanted to win more than any other. The return to racing has been accepted. Now let us show them that they were right!"

Rumors of a late challenge to the French government's decision to allow a Monday resumption from an unnamed quarter had begun to circulate Friday, leading France Galop and its trotting counterparts to issue a joint statement that evening acknowledging that they had been involved in discussions with the state to ensure that Monday's meetings at ParisLongchamp, Compiegne, and Toulouse can all proceed.  

In late April, racing and trotting authorities reached agreement with their government masters at the departments of agriculture and the budget to resume operations behind closed doors on the basis of observing strict sanitary regulations. 

While France Galop developed a series of backup plans in case of a need to do without its main tracks in Paris—the most serious center of the COVID-19 outbreak—the news that police authorities had given the go-ahead for racing in the capital appeared to remove one of the last remaining obstacles.

But at a meeting Thursday evening of Macron's Defense Council—a French version of the Whitehall Cobra committee—the subject of reopening racecourses in the first wave of "deconfinement" was raised, and the president is reported to have vetoed the plan. 

Some French media reports suggest that certain key figures connected with professional football—which, like all team sports, is banned until September under the administration's gradual scheme to reinstate parts of the French economy and society—may have lobbied the government to have a second look at racing, which is under different oversight to the vast majority of sport.

Whatever the source of Macron's initial disquiet, his interior minister, Christophe Castaner, prepared to instruct the prefects of every French department to prevent the reopening of racecourses. 

But after a tense and frantic day of behind-the-scenes negotiation, Rothschild was able to break the news that Macron and his officials had accepted the original dossier for the resumption of racing, and the threat to Monday's meetings was over.