Jess Savner rode horses while she was growing up. She set the school record in pole vaulting in college. She was competing in triathlons when she met Suzie Paxton, an Olympic fencer.
Paxton knew that Savner had competed in horse jumping; Savner was clearly an excellent athlete. That’s where Savner’s quirky, winding road to the Paris Olympic Games took its final turn. “She heard about this girl who was an equestrian and she was like, ‘She could learn how to do pentathlon if she learned how to fence,’ so she approached me,” Savner said.
“She had connections with the New York Athletic Club in Manhattan, which taught me how to fence. That’s where it started.” Savner will compete for the U.
S. in the modern pentathlon , started in the late 1800s by the founder of the modern Olympic Games, Baron Pierre de Coubertin . The event was steeped in military tradition.
In 1912, de Coubertin updated the ancient pentathlon with equestrian show jumping, fencing, swimming, running and target shooting. Women’s modern pentathlon was added to the Olympics in 2000. But Savner, 32, of Bethlehem, will be among the last Olympic athletes to compete in the traditional modern pentathlon after controversy erupted at the last Olympic Games in Tokyo.
A German competitor, Annika Schleu, who was in first place, had a horse that did not want to go near the jumps. Schleu used her whip repeatedly to urge the horse forward, but she was eventually disqualified. Her coach was removed from the re.
