Waiting for the call was agony but the silver medal made up for it .............
Two important announcements are due very soon – the British and Australian eventing teams for the 2016 Rio Olympics. With the eventing competition starting on 5th August, it is exactly one month to the teams presenting their horses at the first inspection and although we already know the make-up of the teams from Germany, Ireland, the USA and New Zealand, Australia and Great Britain are still on tenterhooks
The British equestrian team will be announced today (5th July) and, while Australia has announced its show jumping and dressage teams, the eventing team is still a tightly kept secret. Prue Barrett filled us in on the difficulties of the selection process in a recent interview and we know that waiting for that all-important call is one of the most agonising times in an eventing rider’s life
In the book An Eventful Life – Life Stories of Eventing Champions, we asked the riders about the selection process and this is what we learned from Sonja Johnson
“Prior to the announcement of the Hong Kong team Sonja admits to planning unbelievably slow, painful and unpleasant deaths for all of the Australian Olympic management team. The whole process of team selection was taking its toll and Sonja just wanted to know what was happening. She does admit that she finds the selection process much easier to deal with these days than she has in the past .....”
And when the call comes?
“Sonja describes the phone call telling her she was on the team as ‘strange’ and something she wanted to share with her team mates.
‘After my phone call I knew that Megan (Jones) was on the team so I phoned her to say ‘well done’ and asked how she felt when she had been told. She sheepishly told me she had said ‘O, right, that’s nice, thank you’. I laughed and told her that I had reacted in exactly the same way. We both thought we should have this feeling of euphoria but I think we were both practical enough to think we still have eight more gallops to go before we get to cross country and that’s plenty of time for things to go wrong”
As we now know, things didn’t go wrong; Australia won team silver, Megan very nearly won individual gold and Sonja Johnson is once again waiting for that call
In Britain, Yogi Breisner is preparing for his last Olympics with the British eventing team and this is what he said about that call
