Road to Paris – The Countdown is on!
Today, Wednesday 17 April, marks the ‘100 days to go’ milestone leading up to the 2024 Paris Olympic Games, with the Opening Ceremony scheduled for the evening of Friday 26 July. We thought this would be a great opportunity to detail the schedule for the Jumping competitions and provide a brief overview of how the competitions will work. As is traditionally the case, there will be two separate competitions to enjoy, the Individual competition and the Team competition.
Australia, as well as 18 other countries went through a long qualification process to claim positions in the Olympics Team competition. They will be joined by France, who automatically qualified as they are the host nation, to make 20 countries competing. The team competition will be held before the Individual Competition.
Each team will comprise just three combinations meaning that there is no “drop-score”, so the pressure will be on from go to whoa!
During the Qualification Round, all 60 combinations will compete and scores for each team will be added. The top 10 teams will qualify for the Final, which will be held the following day. All teams will start the Final on an equal footing of zero penalties. If required, a jump-off will be used, involving all three team members, to sort out the medals.
After two rest days for horses and riders, the individual competition will commence.
There will be 75 combinations appearing in the individual competition, comprising of the 60 combinations entered into the Team event as well as 15 combinations from other countries (maximum of one per country). All 75 will compete in the Qualification Round, which will rank the competitors, with the top 30 going through to the Final the following day. Once again, with scores set to zero at the start of the Final, each of the 30 combinations entered will have an equal chance to press their claims for gold medal glory and a jump-off will be used, if required, to sort out the medalists.
We are sure many of you will be interested to watch, so mark these dates and times in your calendar:
Team Qualifying – Thursday 1 August at 11:00 am (7:00 pm AEST)
Team Final – Friday 2 August at 2:00 pm (10:00 pm AEST)
Rest Days – Saturday 3 and Sunday 4 August
Individual Qualifying – Monday 5 August at 2:00 pm (10:00 pm AEST)
Individual Final – Tuesday 6 August at 10:00 am (6:00 pm AEST)
Finally, we are very pleased to announce that the team here at Australian Jumping have been successful in gaining media accreditation to attend the Games. We will be at all the sessions listed above as well as behind the scenes at horse inspections and training rounds to bring you all the action from the Jumping arena in the beautiful grounds of the Palace of Versailles. Bring it on!