Blog
Olympic Eventing: Finals
My boss is awesome and let me take the morning off so I could watch finals. I love my job.
Absolutely amazing weekend for the German team, which took home team and individual gold. All around great riders on the team with lovely horses. Hinrich Romeike did a superb job all the way through and made it look easy.
Australia finished second in the team finals, and Great Britain took third.
The US had some nice rounds, but was too far back to move up at all as a team.
Gina Miles was a superstar—the only US rider with a clean round in the team show jumping, and then she came back for a double clean in the individual. At that point, she was sitting in fourth with the top three individual riders to go.
I wasn’t very optimistic on her medal chances, because the individual course looked pretty straightforward. Lots of room and a very generous time allowed meant that riders could set themselves and their horses up for success. There was no need to cut tight corners or try to catch up time in the longer runs between fences, which meant a pretty even pace all the way through. Early on, it looked like most of the riders were going to go clean.
The closer the order got to the medal contenders, however, the more rails started coming down. Pressure from trying to hold on to whatever spot the had? Mental and physical exhaustion from the weekend catching up with them?
Megan Jones rode after Gina and dropped a rail; Gina was guaranteed bronze. That left German riders Ingrid Klimke and Hinrich Romeike to go, and they each had a rail in the team show jumping round. Ingrid dropped an unfortunate rail in her rounds, putting her in fourth overall and giving Gina the silver and the US its only eventing medal. Hinrich, despite a few rubs, rode a clear round and brought home his double gold.
Great event all around, with courses set up to let the riders show off what they could do without overfacing the competitors.
Now, someone tell the riders that these bug-face looking helmets are absolutely hideous, please. It’s been driving me crazy.
« Olympic Eventing: Cross Country Restless »
On Aug 12, 2008, Halt Near X said:
Not horse related, but can someone remind the announcers that the Atlanta Olympics were in 1996, which was not that long ago, and the women’s gynmastic team won silver in 2004, so it’s not even like they’ve been medal-less since then? Good grief. Next they’re going to come on and say “Will Phelps win a gold medal in the next event? It’s been a whole fifty minutes!“ Oh, wait… they’ve already done that.