Olympic Happy Hour: August 5

Throughout the Olympics, Horse Nation will be capping off each day with a pint-sized synopsis of the most recent Olympic equestrian sporting festivities. Here’s your Happy Hour report for Sunday, August 5.

Take it away, Liz Fletcher:

Happy Sunday, Horse Nation! Just as predicted, day two of show jumping contained some major shake-ups on the leaderboard. Saudi Arabia leads the team competition after round one with one time penalty.

America just barely made the cut this morning as the last team to qualify for the next round. Here are all the qualified teams:

Here is a link to the individual scores.

Rich Fellers and Flexible got it done for America as the only two to go double clear. Fellers and Flexible are nothing if not consistent. McLain Ward and Antares F had one rail down, and Reed Kessler had two rails down which put her total score at 9 faults. She is now eliminated from continuing in the individual competition, but she will still contribute to the team competition. Beezie Madden also had one rail down with Via Volo, giving the U.S. a score of 8 points.

Sad news for the Canadians: Tiffany Foster’s horse Victor has been disqualified. Fifteen minutes before Foster was supposed to enter the ring, the ground jury announced her disqualification. In a statement, the Federation Equestre International [FEI] said: “The Canadian horse Victor, ridden by Tiffany Foster, has been disqualified under the FEI’s hypersensitivity protocol due to an area of clear and obvious hypersensitivity on the front of the left forelimb.”  Due to the elimination of Tiffany and Victor, the Canadians have no option for a dropped score and everyone must have perfect rounds to stay in medal contention. At the moment, the Canadians are in 5^th place in the team competition, and Eric Lamaze on Derly Chin de Muse is the highest ranked Canadian in 13^th place with 1 time penalty over two days of jumping. Read the full article from BBC Sport here.

Great Britain is looking fantastic this games. They have two riders who have had two double clears so far. As a team they have one rail, but they’re easily within striking distance for gold, especially if the Saudi’s start to have some trouble during the next few rounds.

Ben Maher with family and friends, via Ben’s Twitter. Ben currently has 0 faults over two rounds and is tied for first with his stallion Triple X.

Did you miss this morning’s coverage? Watch the replay here. Show jumping continues tomorrow, Monday August 6^th, at 9am EST. Tomorrow will be round two of the team event and round three of the individuals.

Go show jumping!

(Sigh.) Still not Olympic show jumping, photo editor bunnies.