Olympics: Waddell moves up on disappointing day for NZ

7.40am

France, Germany or Britain will have to stage demolition derbies in the Olympic show jumping arena for the New Zealand three-day event team to have any medal chance tomorrow morning (NZ time) in Athens.

A relatively tame cross-country test last night made it hard for New Zealand to advance in the teams' contest and they remained in the same sixth place they occupied after the dressage.

On 156.2 points (the combined totals of their top three riders) going into the show jumping, New Zealand need the third-placed British team (125.6) to drop eight more show-jumping rails than them, or France (113.4) or Germany (119.6) to have even worse disasters.

New Zealand riders have traditionally thrived on the cross-country phase of major international events, where the courage of horse and rider can wipe out the effects of a poor dressage mark.

But few riders were troubled by the cross-country course at the Markopoulo Equestrian Centre.

Ironically, one who did was Andrew Nicholson, who stood by his previous comment that the course was not up to Olympic standard, despite toppling from his horse Fenicio after it clipped a fence.

Nicholson blamed himself for the error.

Leading New Zealand's charge for an individual medal is the team's youngest rider, Heelan Tompkins, on Glengarrick, the oldest horse at the Games.

Tompkins stayed on her dressage score of 44 penalty points after riding clear and within the optimum time -- a feat repeated by teammates Dan Jocelyn on Silence and Matthew Grayling on Revo.

Tompkins climbed to 10th place, Grayling to 17th and Jocelyn to 35th.

Frenchman Nicolas Touzsaint leads the individual competition on 29.4 points, followed by Germany's Bettina Hoy on 35.6 and American Kimberly Severson on 36.2.

Blyth Tait had to restrain his over-zealous 1996 Olympic champion mount Ready Teddy, saying he was trying to jump too fast which could have led to mistakes.

As a result the combination incurred 1.2 time penalties but he moved up the field to 33rd. Nicholson dropped to 64th.

Tompkins said Glengarrick treated the jumps like a pony club course but it would have been easy to have been lulled into sense of false security.

"The hardest part about the course was literally that you had soft fence after soft fence," she said.

A medal is looking less likely for the Tall Blacks, who were national heroes after their giant-slaying feats at the world championships two years ago, but have not found the same fairytale form so far in Athens.

After a narrow opening loss to Italy, the New Zealand men's basketball team last night went down 62-69 to China -- one of the teams they upset in Indianapolis in 2002.

The loss puts New Zealand's hopes of a top eight finish in jeopardy with tournament heavyweights, Serbia and Montenegro, Argentina and Spain yet to come.

New Zealand battled gamely but had no answer to China's colossus Yao Ming who scored 39 points and pulled down 13 rebounds.

New Zealand table tennis representative Li Chunli bowed out of the Games to world No 1 Yining Zhang in straight games.

Competing at her fourth Olympics Chunli, 42, was not disappointed to lose the third round singles match to such a good player who is almost half her age.

But Chunli hasn't ruled out a shot at a fifth Olympics in Beijing in 2008 but hinted that losing to the world No 1 was likely to be her swansong.

After winds faded at the Schinias rowing course, New Zealand single sculler Sonia Waddell cruised into the semifinals, winning her repechage in seven minutes 27.8 seconds.

She eased off in the latter stages to conserve her energy for the semifinals, but was still nearly 13sec clear of her nearest race rival and more than 7sec faster than anyone else in the repechages.

At the yachting venue, fickle winds again conspired to make race organisers' lives a nightmare but New Zealand boardsailor Barbara Kendall had her own nightmare as she over-shot the start line to earn an automatic last placing in the Mistral and slip to 13th overall on the leaderboard.

The men's Mistral was abandoned and other classes postponed but a 17th and an 18th in the women's 470 had the New Zealand pair of Shelley Hesson and Linda Dickson sitting 11th overall.

Men's 470 sailors Andrew Brown and Jamie Hunt improved marginally on their overnight standing with a 23rd and a 13th to climb to 26th.

Laser sailor Hamish Pepper came 26th in his third race and 11th in his fourth to lie 14th.

In the Europe, Sarah Macky had a 9th and 19th for 13th place overall.

In the pool, neither 100m freestyler Cameron Gibson who swam 51.56sec for seventh in his heat or 200m breaststroker Ben Labowitch, 2:19.25 for seventh, progressed beyond their heats.

- NZPA