Thursday 2 August 2012

#TeamGB's Golden Minute #London2012

Celebrating gold
15:37 is the time that Team GB won three medals all at once at two at Lee Valley on the white water course in the C2 there were two British pairs bookending the final six.

First off where Tim Baillee and Etienne Stott who absolutely blitzed the course going clean without hitting a gate in a time of 106.41, faster than anyone had gone in qualification or the semi final. They then sat in the bottom as the Chinese and Poles both hit gates and were outside their time.

Then the French pair Klauss and Peche came down hitting a gate but would have still been outside of the time of the Brits without the 2 second penalty. Team GB were guaranteed a medal but the Hochschorner twins Pavol and Peter from Slovakia unbeaten in the last three Olympic finals.

However, even the great Hochschorners managed to hit a gate and ended up 1.87 seconds behind the Brits. So now Britain were guaranteed gold as only David Florence and Richard Hounslow, the other British pair were left to come down. They were up on their compatriots at both the check points but went in deep on both the upstream gates in the final part of the course and ended up  0.36 seconds down with only the second clean run of the final. Even without penalties it would have been two medals to the Brits.

Two final hits and the moment of relief
Simultaneously at the Royal Artillery Barracks, Woolwich we were reaching the end of the double trap competition. 25-year-old Peter Wilson had qualified for the final 50 clays with a 3 shot lead. The last British gold medalist in shooting Richard Faulds who took the honour in Sydney in 2000 failed to make the final finishing 12th. But the Russian Vasily Mosin seemed to be his closest rival, although Swede Hakan Dahlby was the last shooter to miss a target he'd only qualified in fifth.

But Mosin kept the pressure up reducing the gap to 1 shot at one point. But Wilson regrouped and the Russian and opened the lead to 4 shots with six pairs of shots left while Dahlby caught Mosin up. The Wilson missed both targets to gasps from the home crowd. But he regrouped and kept ahead. But Dahlby overhauled Mosin but the last shots would go to Wilson in each round.

With two rounds to go Mosin missed one, but Wilson shot two to give him a two shot buffer over Dahlby going into the last round. The Swede hit both but so too did Wilson and just after success in Lee Valley we had another gold in Woolwich.

There was another medal guaranteed at the time these golds were won as Gemma Gibbons had already made the final in the Judo women's 78kg. Sadly shortly after having already beaten the world number one and other favoured judokas she lost out to the USA's Kayla Harrison.

Mind you 2 gold and 3 silver today and counting.

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