Preparation for our project work:
Sandra and Veronica had been reading a romantic book about the horse racing industry, and wanted to know wheter it could be real or just fiction. Questions popped up, questions that searched an answered. That was the way we found our topic. And we are interested in horses so this was a golden opportunity to get behind the scenes and see horse-life in the UK.
Janet Higgins, tutor/organiser at the University of Manchester, helped us with the project work. She had organized the meetings and she was our support if we wanted one. She was the one who had arranged the meeting; with Brenda Astrom, our “gambling-guide” and Peter Levy, a racing journalist.
Higgins had searched the Internet for facts, so she sent us some of the information through e-mail, before we began our journey.
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We knew some things about The Grand National. The people in teh UK placed 13 million bets on the race,this year.
40 horses started the race and only 2 finished with a rider.
We have focused on the social aspect of horse racing, and how the sport has developed through history.
We can find facts about the horse racing in books, it is more impressing to actually have been there and seen the reality!
We wrote down some questions that we used as a common base for our meetings/interviews. These questions were the common thread through our work, and some of the questions were answered and some of them were not. But they might be in the future!
Conclusion...
Since there are so many people involved, and it is a money industry, we find similiar difficulties in the horse-racing industry that we can find in a business company, but at a larger scale.
When we compare small Sweden with big Manchester, we must always keep in mind that the city in the UK is much larger and therefore it has security/safety problems that we, that are from " safe little Sweden", would not dream of.
Again, we meet the blue-eyed Swedish people, who can not understand the country unless they widen their perspective, and search for information to get the knowledge and therafter make a statement about the personal feelings about areas concerning the sport.
We discussed the horse-racing at several occasions within the group and with other people. We got a wider perspective about things concerning the sport. Veronica thought that they used the horses for economical benefits and she did not like it.
But here in Sweden, are we not doing the very same thing? Think about it!
Short word glossary:
mated- introducing a stallion to a mare or vice versa
stallion- male horse
mare- female horse
foal- the offspring of a male + female
:-)