Finals

Finals at World’s is probably the hardest event in pentathlon. At the Olympics, only two athletes per country can compete, but here countries can enter four. For nations like Russia, Czech Republic, and Hungary, this means having 3-4 athletes who can win a competition in the final.

Finals are run in the classic order of a pentathlon (shooting, fencing, swimming, riding, running) and you don’t carry anything forward from semifinals. It is always hard to get up 36 hours after a tough semifinal and start over again, but everyone is in the same boat. You push through the soreness and fight as hard as you can for every point.

My weakest two events are shooting and fencing. The good thing about that is that I get them out of the way first thing in the competition. Yesterday, I started out with a 173 shoot, one point less than my semifinal score. While this put me in 35th place after one event, it was good enough that I knew I could have a good day. In fencing, I had an extremely rough start. I went 0-5 on my first 5 bouts, a terrible start to any day. But fortunately there were 30 more bouts after that and I fought my way back into the middle of the pack by the end of fencing. My final tally was just under 50% victories… not too bad for the hardest fencing pool of my career and coming into this competition without any significant focus on my fencing training. After two events, I was in 32nd place; but my scores were keeping me competitive with my strong disciplines up next.

We should have swum next, but the temporary competition pool erected for us leaked overnight and had to be drained, fixed, and refilled. So riding was moved ahead of swimming. My horse was pretty good and I knocked down only one rail and had some time penalties. After riding, I moved into 27th place, but started closing the gap toward the top athletes.

With the pool filled, we moved on to swimming. I dropped a full second from my semifinal time and swam a best this year of 2:00.2. Given that I did not rest for this competition, I was extremely happy with that time. The good showing in swimming moved me up to 20th after 4 events.

Running at the end of a final can be extremely psychologically tough. Because I have not trained much speed this year (my running has mostly consisted of long moderate runs to build base fitness), I had no idea how my legs and lungs would handle a 9 minute all out race. For the first 2 kilometers, I stuck with some of the guys who started close to me and were good runners. With one lap to go, I realized I had enough in my legs to make a surge and I began to accelerate. To my surprise, my speed was unmatched and I passed 8 people moving all the way into 12th place.

This was a great end to a great season for me. My goal at the start of the year was top 10 at Worlds, but a 12th place here while training through the competition is more than enough to make me happy. Going into the Olympics, I know where I have room for improvement, and I feel very confident with my training now. In two and a half months, I’ll take another crack at the World’s best athletes and see how things go!