On a thrilling afternoon in Versailles, the team medals for the Paris 2024 Olympic showjumping were decided with Great Britain soaring home to claim a glorious gold, USA in silver and home nation France celebrating bronze.
USA’s bid for an Olympic medal in Paris began strongly with a second-place finish in Thursday’s Olympic showjumping team qualifier.
They continued that dominance on Friday, starting with a four-fault round from 58-year-old pathfinder Laura Kraut with her brilliant partner Baloutinue. This pair were part of the silver medal-winning squad from the Tokyo Olympics and Laura also won Olympic team gold in 2008. The 14-year-old gelding, who is owned by St Bride’s Farm and looked after by groom Margo Thomas, just tapped out a rail at the in-element of the triple combination to add four penalties to the team score where, under the new format, all three riders’ scores count.
“Any competitor would have had the ‘Coulda, should, woulda’ after that,” reflected Laura. “It was an interesting mistake because the horse doesn’t normally jump over his front end like that. So I’m not quite sure why that happened, because I felt like I approached it as I normally would. But those things happen. He was fantastic, yesterday and today, but for sure, if I had not had the fence we would be wearing a different colour medal.”
Olympic debutant Karl Cook was only drafted in as a last-minute replacement for US team rider Kent Farrington, but the 33-year-old produced his second clear of the Olympics with 12-year-old mare Caracole De La Roque, who is co-owned by French Olympic bronze medallist Eric Navet.
As the final line riders prepared to enter the ring, USA were in the bronze medal position and anchor rider McLain Ward put enormous pressure on the top two teams by bringing home another clear on the hugely scopey 11-year-old Ilex to finish on a team score of four.
Agonisingly, France dropped beneath USA with their final rider Julien Epaillard of France riding Dubai Du Cedre, but when Scott Brash jumped clear with just one time-penalty to secure gold for Great Britain, the US squad were able to celebrate their second successive Olympic team silver medal.
“Obviously this format is a real pressure cooker,” said McLain, who made his Olympic debut at Athens in 2004 and had already claimed a double brace of gold and silver Olympic medals. “The first time we did this format in Tokyo, I looked over at arguably 10 of the best riders in the world and they were all green.
“Second time around, we know how it’s going to go and that break [before the final line riders] certainly ratchets up the pressure and the excitement, so I think that’s great sport.
“I actually thought Ilex felt great yesterday. I was in a situation to just protect a bad day and make sure we qualified. But I knew he was in for a good chance today. I believed in him and my team put me in a great position to try to deliver in a moment and everybody behind me made my job a little bit easier.”
On dealing with the pressure of the anchor role, especially in an Olympic final, McLain revealed he “doesn’t do that easily”.
“I’ve had to work at it really hard,” he admitted. “Early in my career, nerves were a problem at times, or at least the pressure to want to deliver in certain key moments and to be the winner. But I’ve worked at it, I’ve had great help with it and I’ve shared it with a lot of my colleagues. That’s been really fulfilling.
“I know that not only the team here is supporting me in a great way, but I have an incredible internal team of people around me and my family and everybody that’s been with me for years now. This is a brilliant horse, he can do it. I think when you go in knowing that, it allows you to really get into whatever process works best for you and focus on the execution. You also have to digest that sometimes it’s not going to come off and that’s okay. Life will go on.”
Karl Cook added: “This is what you hope for when you’re a kid, hoping to go to the Games one day – it’s really special.”
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