By 3 News staff
The captain of the medal-winning Olympic equestrian eventing team says he finally feels like he deserves his placing in London, but blames a weather delay decision on his individual fourth place.
Andrew Nicholson was disappointed he did not get a medal for the individual equestrian competition, blaming the weather delays before his dressage performance.
“I'm pretty gutted to be fourth. At the Olympic Games - fourth, last, there's not a lot in it.”
Nicholson debuted at the 1988 Seoul Olympics and has competed at each Games since then, making London 2012 his seventh Olympics.
Last night, his five-strong team took out the bronze medal in the eventing category, coming in behind Germany with gold and Great Britain with silver.
The equestrian veteran says the team pushed themselves right to the end and they deserved their medal.
“I’m very, very proud of them all. We pulled together, dug deep and there we go, we got bronze medals.”
He says he was disheartened with silver at the Barcelona Olympics in 1992 and the bronze in Atlanta in 1996.
“Whereas this one, I feel like the team deserve it, I deserve it and we’ve got the reward of it.
“This is the first Olympics I’ll go home feeling I’ve really given fully and come up with some goods,” he says.
But Nicholson says he will never get over the controversial grand jury decision to have a 10-minute weather delay which he says affected his dressage performance on Sunday and caused him to come fourth.
“I’m quite sure I could have saved quite a few marks on the dressage but that’s history, done now. I won’t forget it, I won’t forgive anyone whose decision it was to stop, we’ve finished the competition now the ones that won the individual medals deserved them, they were better than me over the competition and we’ve just got to make the most of the team bronze.”
He says he knew the delays would make a difference.
“A lot of people couldn’t quite see where I was coming from at the beginning when I said this little problem with the dressage is going to be very costly for me, but you know at this level a couple of points is very expensive.”
3 News