Unity animation doesn't work after time delay or when accessed from another script?

Hi I have a scene where horses run on a track. When i press play(none of the horses are player controlled. its all AI) everything works fine. The horses run. Running animation is played. Now I wanted to set a delay before horses run. I used coroutines for that purpose. When i pressed play and the delay was over, the race started the horses were moving forward but the running animation did not play. I also tried using Time.time difference for the delay, it still didnt work. One more thing earlier when i was trying to access the running script. The same issue was there. the horses were moving forward but the animation didnt play?

What could be the problem?