Clipping the first part of the triple combination in the final round of the FEI World Cup Jumping Final at Omaha tonight added four faults to Ireland’s Denis Lynch’s penalty score, and although he left all the other poles standing with the stallion All Star, a time fault pushed his week’s total up every further.
The first round saw All Star take two bricks out of the blue wall, adding to penalties picked up during the last few days.
After round one tonight, Lynch said in a frank interview: “ It’s not been going the way I expected. We’ve had one fence down, one time fault and now tonight clipping the wall. It’s very disappointing, but that’s show jumping, I suppose. We just have to look ahead to the next round.”
Unfortunately the next round did nothing to improve the Tipperary rider’s score, and he finally settled for 17th place, a stark comparison to his fifth place at the World Cup Final last year.
Irishman Alan Wade’s tough course showed little accommodation for the world’s top riders at the CenturyLink Centre at Omaha, yielding only ten clear rounds from a starting field of 26 in the first round, and seven in the final round.
The popular winner of the Nebraska World Cup Final was the USA’s McLain Ward with the mare HH Azur, the first American winner on home soil since 1980, who did not lower a single pole during the five rounds of the contest this week.
Second place went to 22 year-old Swiss rider Romain Duguet with Twentytwo des Biches and third place to Sweden’s Henrik von Eckermann with Mary Lou.
Jack Burns
We Live Horse 