Lena Schoneborn of Germany won the women’s modern pentathlon yesterday, emerging triumphant in the five sports in a day event.
The 22-year-old was never headed in the overall standings after winning the fencing, the second of the five disciplines.
Britain’s Heather Fell, who started 19 seconds behind Schoneborn heading into the concluding 3,000m run, took the silver while Ukraine’s Victoria Tereshuk claimed bronze.
Schoneborn, an economics student in Berlin, followed the now retired Stephanie Cook of Britain (Sydney 2000) and Hungary’s Zsuszanna Voros (Athens 2004) as the only winners of the Olympic women’s modern pentathlon.
Her cumulative score after four rounds of 4,584 points was converted into a 19 second lead over Fell for the finale, where the overall leader was the first off in a staggered start.
This meant whoever was first across the line would be Olympic champion.
Schoneborn set off determined to make her head-start count and conscious that Fell would have to pull out all the stops to catch-up on a twisty course of three 1,000m laps laid out on the Olympic Sports Center athletics track rather than the traditional cross-country.
Although Fell cut her rival’s lead to 11 seconds, Schoneborn was never under serious threat.
France’s Amelie Caze, who in June won her second straight world championship title, started the 3,000m in fourth place but was run out of a medal place.
Schoneborn, runner-up in last year’s world championships, had seen her lead cut from 60 to 48 points after the 200m swim, the third leg of the event.
Coming into the penultimate show-jumping phase she had to follow an excellent round from Fell, who went into the lead after knocking over only two of the 12 fences.
But Schoneborn who, like all her rivals, was riding a horse she’d never sat on before, responded by having just one fence down.
“It was a good start, fencing was the basis of my win. It was a good result and I was lucky to get a good horse [in the show-jumping],” Schoneborn said.
Mondern Pentathlon was created by the founder of the modern Olympics, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, is an attempt to mirror the tasks that a Napoleonic soldier might have had to carry out.
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