Colombia Fails in Last Hope to Send Rider to Olympics, Austria Gets 2nd Individual
13 years ago StraightArrow Comments Off on Colombia Fails in Last Hope to Send Rider to Olympics, Austria Gets 2nd Individual
LIPICA, Slovenia, July 15–Colombia failed to qualify a single dressage combination for the Olympics starting next month when their last hope, Maria Ines Garcia on Kupfermann was unable to get a second qualifying Grand Prix score at the Lipica World Cup event Saturday and Austria will get a second individual to join Victoria Max-Theurer in London.
Maria Ines and Kupfermann was the sole combination to earn a qualifying score from the four that made the attempt in recent monhs after the South Ameican nation won the right to send a team to an Olympics for the first time by placing third in the Pan American Games in Guadalajara, Mexico, last October.
The pair obtained the first of two required scores of 64 per cent at the Achleiten CDI3* and competed here Saturday in an attempt to earn the second result.
However, they scored 61.426 per cent and will not have another opportunity to earn a score before the deadline of next Monday, June 17.
In addition to Maria Ines, Marco Bernal of Wellington, Florida and Don Akzentus, Constanza Jaramillo and Wakana and Raul Corchuelo and Gusarapo launched an expensive but ill-fated campaign to gain the qualifying scores at competitions in Europe.
Two unconfirmed individual places remain–Vanessa Way and KH Arvan of New Zealand obtained the required Olympic qualifying scores but so far have been unable to meet higher score levels imposed by the N.Z. Olympic Committee and an appeal by the Dominican Republic over the qualificaton of Brazil for an individual representative from South America is still to be heard by the Court of Arbitration for Sport.
