From hope to feeling disappointed – the court of the horse. The start of our last athlete in Paris at the weekend symbolically illustrated the dynamics of most of Latvia’s hopes for the 2024 Olympic Games. After a promising semi-final, Pavel Shvetsov was unlucky with his horse’s draw in the final. “I rode very well, but the result was bad. When I saw my result as the penultimate one in riding, the mood was no longer such that I could compete further,” Shvetsov explained the sharp drop in performance in swimming and running. After the restoration of national independence, Latvian athletes returned from the Summer Olympic Games without medals for the fourth time and for the second time during the last three games.
Latvia’s modern pentathlon Olympic hopes and the horse have been difficult to combine values before. “In all four Olympic Games, the horse has taken me “very far”, twelve years ago in London, one of our leading pentathletes of the previous generation admitted to the author of these lines with great disappointment after an unsuccessful Olympic start. We are not the only ones, as evidenced by the fact that the Paris Games were the last with equestrian competitions in the traditional modern pentathlon program – after four years in Los Angeles, athletes will have to overcome various obstacles by themselves, without the help of an animal. This is a weak consolation for Shvetsov, who really successfully started the competition in Paris, because the third best result in the rating round in fencing was a strong basis for the fight for a high place in both the semi-finals and the final, where the athletes kept these earned points. In the semi-final, a flawless riding in the Riverland and a good result in swimming, which is among Pavel’s strongest disciplines, the Latvian was in the lead before the decisive running/shooting combination, where he safely managed to qualify for the final.
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2024-08-14 16:59:55