Scoring mistake leads to German gold at young rider eventing champs
The German young rider eventing team has belatedly been awarded joint gold medals with Team GB after a scoring mistake at the 2010 European Young Rider Eventing Championships in Pardubice (29 July-1 August).
The Germans had been awarded team silver behind the British quartet of Tom McEwen, Emily Parker, Laura Collett and Emily Llewellyn.
But a spokesman for the International Equestrian Federation (FEI) said a subsequent decimal-point correction to the dressage scores meant that the two teams finished on exactly the same score.
This was not the only confusion over the results as after the competition finished Britain was originally announced as having taken the silver, but after an appeal Team GB was awarded the team gold.
The FEI will now provide four additional gold medals to the members of the German team — Sonja Buck, Franziska Roth, Freya Fuellgraebe and Sabine Deparade.
FEI eventing director Catrin Norinder said: “There was no appeal by the German team.
“The FEI corrected a very simple mistake that had been made in the rounding off of the decimal points in dressage which had not been done according to the FEI rules.
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We want to be fair to all the athletes and it was agreed that awarding two sets of gold medals was the best solution.”
The individual placings remain unaltered with British rider Emily Parker as individual gold medallist.
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A self-confessed newshound, farmer’s daughter and journalist of many years' experience, Charlotte worked on regional papers before joining H&H in 2007. A regular rider, she visited Ireland in 2010 to investigate the fate of Irish horses through the recession, to much acclaim, and reported from the FEI General Assembly in Rio de Janeiro in 2011. She left Horse & Hound in March 2013.