Olmps

Why Watch Modern Pentathlon?

Imagine a nineteenth-century soldier trapped behind

enemy lines, cornered in an island castle.. He has to fight his way out with his sword before swimming across the lake and grabbing the nearest available horse..After galloping the animal to exhaustion, he’d have to abandon his mount and start running across the countryside.. Every now and again he might need to fire off a few rounds at the enemy, but eventually he’d escape and return home to a hero’s welcome..

This is the kind of scenario Baron de Coubertin, father of the modern Games, had in mind when he devised the only sport specifically created for the Olympics.. It’s hard not to love an event based on a proto-Bond fantasy: pentathlon is anachronistic, but the old-fashioned strangeness is a major part of its charm. . In some ways the modern pentathlon’s presence in the Olympics is like The Boomtown Rats’ slot at Live Aid in 1985.. Nobody can really begrudge the organiser a place at his own party but does his creation deserve to be there on merit? The jury is out as far as the modern pentathlon is concerned..

The Story of Modern Pentathlon

At the fourteenth session of the IOC in Budapest in

1911, Baron de Coubertin reported that ‘the Holy Ghost of sport illuminated my colleagues and they accepted a competition to which I attach great importance’.. Just as the organisers of the ancient Games had used the original pentathlon as both a training for war and as an alternative to it, De Coubertin wanted the modern pentathlon to improve the world by getting the world’s soldiers involved in friendly competition.. He believed that the sport would test ‘a man’s moral qualities as much as his physical resources and skills, producing thereby the ideal, complete athlete’.. It’s just as well he never met Boris Onishchenko – of whom more below..

Not surprisingly, given its origins, the history of the modern pentathlon is closely intertwined with that of the Olympics.. Prior

then have twenty minutes to ride their new equestrian partners in a practice arena..The course itself must include twelve obstacles, one of which must be a double and one a triple jump..The fences may be up to 1..2m in height and at least five of them have to be..

Points are awarded on the basis of a standard time for completion of the course, which varies according to its distance..A rider who achieves a clear round within the time limit earns 1200 points.. Each additional second incurs a penalty of 4 points.. If a competitor fails to complete the course within twice the standard time, he or she must stop riding, as must any rider who has fallen twice.. They are then deducted 100 points for every obstacle they failed to negotiate..

Other penalties include 20 points for each fault (knocking down part of an obstacle) and 40 points for every refusal to jump.. If a horse baulks twice at the same jump, the rider must move on to the next one..

Combined Event

In 2008, the uipm combined the shooting and running

disciplines into a new event, which closes each competition.. It has a staggered start, the athletes being handicapped on the basis of the scores they have accumulated in the preceding events..

The race begins with a run of about 20m to a shooting range, where each pentathlete has seventy seconds to hit five 59..5mm targets from a distance of 10m with an air pistol (or laser version)..There is no limit to the number of shots competitors can fire within the time limit but they must keep their pistols in contact with the shooting table throughout the reloading procedure.. They must also leave them in a safe position, i..e.. open, unloaded and pointing at the target area.. Each infringement of these rules results in a time penalty of ten seconds..These are paid on the spot: guilty parties are held back from continuing the event until they have done their time..

If athletes manage to hit all five targets within the allotted time, they can immediately set off on the first of three 1000m runs.. If they fail to hit one or more of the targets, they have to wait until seventy seconds have elapsed before they can start running..There

are no other penalties for missed targets – if you don’t hit all five, you might as well miss the lot..

The shooting procedure is repeated after the first and second 1000m runs..The third run ends at the finishing line..As a result of the handicapping system, the first to cross is the winner of the entire competition..

The Finer Points

Many sports are better watched live than on tv and

the modern pentathlon is a prime example. .The tension builds throughout the day,creating a buzz around the last event that it is impossible to feel if you haven’t watched the drama unfold in real time..

For some spectators, the modern pentathlon can suffer from a problem afflicting all multi-disciplinary sports: there are better performers of each of the individual elements elsewhere. . But with this sport, you have to think cumulatively.. If you can find time to watch only a couple of the disciplines, make them the riding and the combined event..The first can be especially dramatic, with some competitors scuppering their chances by ploughing into obstacles and others setting themselves up with immaculate rounds.. The run/shoot provides an element of novelty as well as a satisfactory denouement..

Modern Pentathlon

Goes to the Olympics

The modern pentathlon made its debut at the

Stockholm Games in 1912..The Swedes took to the new sport in a big way, filling six of the first seven places in the inaugural competition and going on to win eight of the first nine Olympic titles.. Future US General George Patton came fifth in 1912, let down, ironically, by his shooting.. He came 21st in that leg, though he claimed that he had been wrongly penalised for missing a target when, in fact, his bullet had passed through an existing hole..This

demonstrated the initiative that would serve him well in wartime, but nobody believed him..

Before the shooting event at the 1932 Games, Sweden’s Johan Oxenstierna decided to fire off a few practice rounds in the woods.. He was accosted by an LAPD officer, who threatened to arrest him.. Oxenstierna insisted that he was about to take part in an Olympic competition; the policeman, though suspicious, eventually relented, and Oxenstierna won the gold..

At Helsinki 1952, Lars Hall, a carpenter from Gothenburg, become the first non-military winner of the modern pentathlon, and struck lucky in the equestrian competition: after the horse he initially drew turned out to be lame, he was matched up with the best show jumper in Finland. .The Helsinki Games also saw the introduction of a team

competition, which en-

dured until Barcelona.. The pentathlon compe-

tition at the 1968 Games in Mexico was marred by an incident involving West Germany’s Hans-Jürgen Todt, who became so frustrated with the refusal of his horse to jump one of the obstacles that he attacked the animal and had to be dragged away by teammates..At the same Games, Sweden’s Hans-

Gunnar Liljenwall became the first athlete to fail an Olympic drugs test; he claimed he’d had a couple of beers to steady his nerves ahead of the shooting..At the next Olympics, in Munich, fourteen pentathletes were discovered to have taken tranquilisers ahead of the shooting contest..The drugs in question,Librium andValium,were

banned by the UIPM but not by the IOC, whose verdict trumped that of the sport’s governing body..

The pentathlon at Montreal in 1976 got off to a poor start when Captain Orben Greenwald of the USA was court-martialled for insubordination by his own team manager, Lieutenant-Colonel Donald Johnson..Things went from bad to worse when Red Army Major Boris Onishchenko was discovered to have cheated in the team competition..The Soviet Union was disqualified, paving the way for Great Britain’s Jeremy Fox, Robert Nightingale and Adrian Parker to win the gold..

Not so Onishchenko

Boris Onishchenko went into the 1976 Montreal Games as a much respected modern pentathlete, having won team gold and an individual silver at the previous Games, and an individual silver four years

before. By the time he left, the Soviet volleyball team had threatened to throw him out of a window if they ever came across him in the Olympic village.

T h e e p i s o d e t h a t shattered Onishchenko’s reputation occurred during the USSR team’s fencing contest against Great Britain. British captain Jeremy Fox had sensed something fishy when the Ukrainian registered a hit against his team mate Adrian Parker without appearing to have touched him. When the same thing happened to

Fox,he protested.While the

officials inspected his épée,Onishchenko continued to fence – remarkably well – with a substitute weapon. He won his duel with Fox but shortly afterwards it was announced that he had been disqualified.

It transpired that Onishchenko had equipped his sword with a hidden circuit breaker that allowed him to register a hit at the push of a button.The incident would have been embarrassing for any sport, but the modern pentathlon’s connection with notions of military honour made it especially so. Onishchenko was whisked away from the Games and never seen outside the USSR again.

The organisers of the modern pentathlon at Los Angeles in 1984 took two important steps to restore the sport’s reputation..To combat the problem of doping, they decided to move the shooting

– the most common occasion for pill-popping – to a slot a few hours before the running competition.. No one wanted to be tranquillised before a run, so the measure proved very effective..The second big decision was to stagger competitors’ starting times in the final event, the cross-country, on the basis of their cumulative scores going into the race..The athlete who first crossed the line would win the gold medal, a move that undoubtedly improved the pentathlon as a spectacle..

In 1992 the UIPM decided to tinker with the formula again by moving the riding to the end of the team and the individual competitions..The logic was that this portion of the pentathlon was subject to wilder score swings than the other disciplines, so bad showings in the riding could knock participants out of contention for the remainder of the competition.. It therefore made sense to hold the event at the end, maintaining the suspense for longer..The individual final did indeed produce a dramatic reversal – Russia’s Eduard Zenovka went into the final round 106 points ahead of Poland’s Arkadiusz Skrzypaszek and finished it 212 behind – but the sport’s authorities voted to return to the previous structure at the following Games..

The modern pentathlon at Atlanta was enlivened by the Swedish-American actor Dolph Lundgren landing the role of non-competing US team leader..This was of limited relevance as

the team competition had been dropped from the Games after Barcelona, but Lundgren’s presence did much to raise the profile of the event..Two years earlier, he had starred in a universally panned film called Pentathlon, as an East German gold medallist escaping the clutches of a sadistic trainer, played by David Soul..

A women’s modern pentathlon competition was added to the Olympic menu at Sydney 2000, with Great Britain’s Stephanie Cook taking the gold medal ahead of Emily de Riel of the USA..

Hungary’s ZsuzsannaVörös and Germany’s Lena Schöneborn

have won the two subsequent Olympic titles..

The most significant recent development in modern pentathlon has been the UIPM’s creation of a combined running and shooting event, which will be making its Olympic debut at London 2012.. It remains to be seen whether the change will be enough to counter the many critics of its Olympic status, who argue that it’s too esoteric a sport, and isn’t well suited to television..The sport’s finances aren’t in great shape either: being a modern pentathlete is an expensive business, and national funding has diminished substantially since the demise of the team event.. But the modern pentathlon survived a vote on its Olympic future in 2005 and its inclusion is guaranteed as far as the London Games at least..

ROWING

28 July–4 August 2012

Eton Dorney RoWING Centre

Athletes: 550 | Golds up for grabs: 14

Olympic presence

Men’s 1900–present; women’s from 1976.

Olympic Format

Fourteen events are held over six days (8 men’s,

6 women’s),in classes organised by number of rowers (singles,pairs, fours and eights) and types of rowing (sculls and sweeps)..

Contenders:

In men’s rowing the medallists are likely to come

from North America, Australasia and northern Europe,

with the Germans and British looking particularly strong.. In the women’s events the strongest crews tend to come from the USA,

Netherlands, China, Romania and Britain..

Past Champions:

East Germany: 33 | USA: 31 | Great Britain: 24

Why Watch Rowing?

In 1996, on winning his fourth consecutive gold, an

exhausted Steve Redgrave told the world that if anyone saw him near a rowing boat again they should shoot him.. Rowing is a sport that demands a colossal amount of training, and an ability to endure immense physical pain.. Rowers face backwards during a race, so a tactical and psychological advantage is gained by being in front;

consequently they must start with an explosive sprint that necessarily floods the body with lactic acid, which in turn means that the muscles are burning through the whole race..

Yet despite all this, Redgrave came back and won his fifth gold medal in the coxless fours at Sydney in 2000..What brought him back? A shot at making Olympic history? Or was it the adrenaline rush of making these lightweight boats fly through the water, of working in telepathic harmony with a team of superlative athletes?

The Story of Rowing

Rowing began when somebody worked out you got

more bang for your buck if you moved a paddle on a fixed fulcrum rather than just dabbing at the water.. It worked even better if you could corral a large number of people to row in time, and for longer and harder than they would otherwise choose..Thus the battleships of antiquity, from Egypt to Phoenicia, and Greece to Rome, were invariably rowed by banks of chained slaves.. For over two millennia, maritime empires stuck with slave rowers where they could, though the Vikings rowed their own long boats in a spirit of commando imperialism. .The Battle of Lépanto in 1571, at which the combined forces of Spain,Venice and the papacy defeated the fleet of Ottoman Empire, was the last great naval engagement fought by rowing boats: oar power thereafter was the preserve of the domestic waters of rivers, harbours and canals..

Rowing’s transition to an organised sport began in seventeenth century England..The Thames thronged with oarsmen and rowing boats, and the quays were thick with gentlemen itching for a wager..The first regular rowing race was established by the Georgian actor and comedian Thomas Doggett.. On a late-night journey from the West End to his home in the City, he had difficulty in persuading any ferryman to row him through the stormy weather.. One finally agreed and got Doggett home, and in his honour Doggett established in 1715 an annual race on the Thames for ferrymen, for which a badge and coat where offered as prizes.. The craze for rowing races grew to the point where Joseph Strutt,