Jumping at the Paris Olympics: not a day to celebrate for the Swiss!

With 24 pts, the Guerdat-Schwizer-Fuchs trio (12th) won't be going into tomorrow's team final at 2pm! With 20 pts, they would still have made it (9th). A huge disappointment that we'll have to digest quickly! Brazil even more cruelly punished. Germany looks set for glory, but the USA, Great Britain, Ireland and Belgium are also strong.
A big blow for the Swiss... after the sixth fault of our three Swiss, synonymous with non-qualification for tomorrow's team final at 2pm on Friday! From the very first run, in fact, it was as if something was wrong. The result was a 12th-place finish, a look of defeat, questioning and doubt. It wasn't a festive day in Versailles on August 1st! 

We'd already had that bad feeling that we were going to miss out on the event after Steve Guerdat and Dynamix de Bélhème's unusual 8-pt ride. Of course, there were 17 efforts to overcome, technical lines, but these two had accustomed us to so much better. Had the mare been put through enough "hard work" in recent months? Was she impressed by the enclosure?  She seemed surprisingly shy and less energetic.

"From the very first jump, my mare was unusually tense. It was one of our worst tricks, because I could see that she wasn't relaxed, that she was holding back a little, whereas in training she'd been top notch. Normally, she's always 200% sure of what she's doing, but not in this case. I'll have to find answers to these questions," admitted Steve Guerdat. 

Things were about to get even more complicated with Pius Schwizer and Vancouver de Lanlore 12 pts behind. The Lucerne native, less sure than usual, couldn't explain his mistakes. And the excellent SF stallion, competing with Pénélope Leprévost in Tokyo in 2021, seemed less dashing than in June. "My horse lost concentration towards the end. It's hard for me to understand how we ended up like that." 

Time for questions, then time to win back!

Martin Fuchs knew he had to complete a clear round to keep his hopes alive, and he almost did. Leone Jei flew over the difficulties, right up to the triple, where the distance between the two verticals was short for him. "I was too wary of the pink palanque 13b, not enough of the 13c! I should have asked for more!" the Zurich native lamented. 

The entire Swiss camp was disconsolate. Thomas Fuchs wanted to console himself by pointing out that with one less bar, the team would have been 9th and in the final, but this didn't really convince him. Peter van der Waaij, the Dutch leader of the Swiss, called a spade a spade: "It's a real defeat, the worst thing we could have imagined. We're going to have to pull ourselves together". 

It will be a question of understanding what was lacking in some or others, of clearing the air and remobilizing for Monday's individual qualifier.