GERMANY cruised to a third successive team gold medal in the showjumping contest last night with an emphatic performance that saw them secure first place before the final round had started. The win brings a gold medal at a fifth successive Games for Ludger Beerbaum, their top rider — who won the individual gold in 1992, the only Olympics since Stockholm in 1956 in which Germany have not managed to win the team gold.
The United States won the silver medal after a thrilling jump-off against Sweden, both teams having finished on a score of 20. Sweden’s bronze, which was greeted with prolonged cheers from their army of supporters round the Markopoulo Equestrian Centre, is their first Olympic showjumping medal since they won the bronze in Amsterdam in 1928.
Great Britain did not qualify for the team event but had plenty to cheer about in the outstanding performance of Nick Skelton, on Arko III, who followed his five faults in the first round of the team contest with a foot-perfect clear display in the second. The performance put Skelton second behind Beerbaum in the individual standings, from which the top 40 go through to the final on Friday, when the riders will begin again on a score of zero.
“He’s going better and better,” a delighted Skelton said of John Hales’s ten-year-old stallion. “In the first round he was jumping a little bit green and looking at all the fences, but I’m not worried — there won’t be many horses qualifying for the final which haven’t had a fence down, and by Friday he should be used to all the different jumps.”
Robert Smith, on Mr Springfield, the only other Briton in the event, has also reached the final but in a less convincing manner, collecting eight faults in the first round and nine in the second.
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France, one of the favourites to win the team contest, were forced to withdraw when two of their horses — Bruno Broucqsault’s Dileme de Cephe and Eric Navet’s Dollar du Maurier — suffered injuries.