Olympics: NZ medal hopes go begging on day 5

11.30am

The New Zealand women's basketball and hockey teams ended day five of the Athens Olympics with defeats while New Zealand's medal chances, albeit slim ones, went begging in three sports.

The Tall Ferns were comprehensively thumped 91-57 by Spain, only two days after recording their first ever preliminary round victory at the Olympics on Monday.

Today the Ferns never came close to emulating another win with Spain streaking out to a 32-8 lead at the end of the quarter.

The Black Sticks also lost their group match 0-2 against Japan despite having a wealth of shots on goal and corners.

Their Olympic hopes now rely on a series of favourable results while their final two matches are against top seeds Argentina and Spain later this week.

Teenage colossus Valerie Adams' dreams of glory at her first Olympics ended in ruins at the ancient Olympia stadium, after she started so promisingly in the women's shot put competition.

The 1.93m tall Aucklander initially thrived as one of the first women to compete in the arena where the Olympics began as a male-only festival in 776BC . She needed just one throw, of 18.79m, to qualify for the final in fifth place.

But she did not improve on that effort. Her best throw of 18.56m in the final was just 3cm short of the distance to make the cut when the final field was trimmed from 12 to eight.

Initial disappointment at her ninth placing was soon tempered by the realisation that, as the youngest competitor in the field, she will have future Olympics to make amends.

Her coach and confidante Kirsten Hellier put down her below-par performance to lack of competition after suffering appendicitis five weeks ago.

New Zealand had its first sniff of a medal at the Games overnight (NZ time) when Nadine Stanton qualified fourth for the final of the women's double trap shooting competition.

But Stanton, who won gold and silver medals at the Manchester Commonwealth Games, faded under the blazing sun and pressure of the final. Her concentration also faltered when the trap malfunctioned twice for her, releasing only one target each time instead of two.

She finished sixth out of six in the final with a total score of 137 points, nine adrift of gold medallist Kimberly Rhode of the United States who won her second Olympic gold.

The New Zealand three-day event team, sixth going into today's showjumping, needed a minor miracle to win a medal and it did not happen.

Their only consolation was that they overtook defending Olympic champions Australia for fifth place overall.

Low dressage scores followed by a relatively tame cross-country course left the New Zealand riders with too much ground to make up to medal, unless the leading teams had collective disasters in the jumping arena.

Germany won the gold medal, after being relegated for an apparent starting fault by leading rider Bettina Hoy, then reinstated an hour later.

France took the silver medal and Britain bronze.

Hoy went on to win the individual gold medal in the final jumping round. New Zealand's best performer was Heelan Tompkins, on Glengarrick, who finished eighth overall.

The picture looks brighter for New Zealand at the wind and weed-affected Schinias rowing course, with four New Zealand boats following double sculls gold medal favourites Caroline and Georgina Evers-Swindell into Saturday's finals.

In the coxless pairs semifinals, Nathan Twaddle and George Bridgewater were beaten home by Australia and Croatia, but narrowly held off the fast-finishing British crew to clinch the third qualifying spot.

Sonia Waddell was third behind Olympic champion Ekaterina Karsten and Bulgarian two-time world champion Rumyana Neykova in her semifinal but happy to qualify for the final after having to recover quickly from her repechage the previous day.

Juliette Haigh and Nicky Coles, who tipped out of their boat in the coxless pairs heats, put that mishap behind them as they finished second in their four-team repechage to go through to the final.

The coxless four of Donald Leach, Mahe Drysdale, Carl Meyer and Eric Murray produced New Zealand's best rowing performance of the day, finishing within a boat-length of Olympic champions Great Britain for second place in their semifinal.

Boardsailor Barbara Kendall bounced back from her automatic last placing for jumping the start in her previous race. She finished second in her only race today to be lying 10th after four of the 11 races and is still able to discard her disastrous result of the previous day.

Dean Kent, who broke his own national 200m individual medley record in the heats, bowed out of the Games on a disappointing note in the semifinals. His 2min 1.94sec semifinal time was 0.63sec slower than his heat time and ranked him 14th overall.

- NZPA