Kim Severson and Winsome Adante won their third Rolex Kentucky horse trials in four years on Sunday, having led throughout.
Watched by “Dan’s” British breeders, Janet and Chris Gooch, they went into the show jumping with four fences in hand, to win the $65,000 first prize.
Leslie Law, runner up overnight on Keith Scott’s Coup de Couer, finished third after dropping a rail at an airy parallel and incurring one even more costly time penalty. However Leslie was ecstatic about the horse, saying: “Beijing, here he come.”
He was also full of praise for Kim: “She may be the Olympic silver medallist but she was golden today.”
That Kim would win was never really in doubt, as sunshine finally drenched the Kentucky Horse Park, though for others Richard Jeffrey’s course meant plenty of falling poles and time faults.
Adante looked superb as he bounded into the arena. He seemed unsettled for one nanosecond as the crowd squealed when he rolled a pole, but Kim kept her composure to complete on a clean sheet.
Philip Dutton kept his trio in the top five, though Nova Top dropped two places with two down.
Jan Thompson and Task Force held on to sixth, while Karen O’Connor made quiet progress to rise to seventh, having survived a sticky moment the day before when Upstage put down on a brush fence.
Andrew Hoy had given up hopes of winning a second leg of the Grand Slam after Yeoman’s Point finished seventh overnight, and dropped a further place with two fences down.
Kim, never the most voluble, simply said of her horse: “I guess we have been through so much together that I know what he’s going to do, and he knows what I’m going to do. I will never have one like this again.”
