It's actually time again for a bit of luck in the German show jumping camp after the Olympic disappointment.

Has football friend Otto Becker thought of Jürgen "Kobra" Wegmann in the past few days?

The most famous saying of the kicking original from the late eighties also fits the team of the national coach: "At first we weren't lucky, and then there was also bad luck."

Evi Simeoni

Sports editor.

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Three and a half weeks ago in Tokyo, if their top couple Daniel Deußer and Killer Queen had delivered the hoped-for zero-error ride for the Olympic bronze in the final round of the Nations Cup, they would have been able to do so. But in the harsh reality, Killer Queen refused, quite atypically, the triple combination. To protect his horse, the rider took off his hat, the once glorious German team ended up in nowhere.

At the European Championships in Riesenbeck in the Tecklenburger Land, the Germans want to prove that the image they gave in Tokyo - in individual cases, Deusser was the 18th best German - is not typical.

The start on Wednesday in the title fights, which will last until Sunday, went off brilliantly, after the time competition they are in second place behind Sweden.

And championship newcomer David Will from Dagobertshausen in North Hesse took the lead in the individual ranking with a breathtaking lap with his gelding C Vier.

Before - and that's the smaller surprise - the Swede Peder Fredricson on Catch Me Not.

Old hand, young horse

But there is still a long way to go, this Thursday and Friday the two Nations Cup rounds are on the program.

And Germans are having a hard time for two reasons.

First of all, the world number one Deusser is not at the start.

The Wiesbaden resident, who lives in Belgium, won a car with Killer Queen last Saturday at the domestic tournament in Brussels and came in close to second in the Grand Prix on Sunday.

And secondly, Maurice Tebbel, the youngest at the age of 27, who would still have contested his fourth championship, dropped out at short notice.

His stallion Don Diarado is plagued by a hoof ulcer.

So Becker is missing his top rider and an important support.

His team from Riesenbeck is more like an experimental group - despite all the good preliminary work at normal tournaments.

In addition to the two Tokyo riders Christian Kukuk with Mumbai (10th in the European Championship individual ranking) and Andre Thieme with Chakaria (17th), Will, the 33-year-old star from day one, and his successor Marcus Ehning on Stargold, now come slipped to 30th place with two drops.

He's an old hand, but his horse isn't.

So anything is possible.

In the battle for the medals they wanted to have a say, said Becker.

The hot phase is only just coming. But decisive fractions of points may already have arisen in the time jump.

The advantage for a team with as many inexperienced components as the German: At the European Championships, unlike at the Olympics, there are cancellation results, so that an accident like that of Deußer in Tokyo does not immediately destroy all hopes.

Otto Becker: "Hats off"

What the Germans basically lack is what Otto Becker calls "seasoned world-class couples". Ehning is a show jumping rider with an extensive championship history. He was a team Olympic champion in Sydney as early as 2000. He won the World Cup three times. But a generation change is taking place in his stable. Stargold, a ten-year-old Oldenburg stallion who likes to wedge backwards on the go, is a horse for the future.

World champion Simone Blum and the proven Christian Ahlmann had to pass before Tokyo because their horses were canceled. And some of the old cracks stopped altogether. Like Ludger Beerbaum, for example. He ended his career in the national team after the Olympic Games in Rio 2016. Occasionally he is still on the course like last weekend in Hamburg. But mainly he is an equestrian manager and in this capacity he is the host of the European Championships.

In January he sold his tournament and training center “Riesenbeck International” to the Dutch investor group Waterland, it was merged into the “Global Equestrian Group”, and Beerbaum is the managing director. Christian Kukuk is employed in his stable - so he has a home game. The industry greatly appreciates the fact that Beerbaum put the European championship off the ground at short notice after the corona-related postponement of the Olympics. “Hats off,” says Otto Becker.

It is a bit as if the riders had squeezed the originally planned competition year 2021 together into the post-Olympic autumn: the tournament in Hamburg last week, now the EM for show jumping, then the EM in dressage in Hagen, immediately afterwards the CHIO in Aachen and then the eventing championship in Avenches. In any case, Becker has not yet had time to consider what lessons he could learn from Tokyo. Maybe: do it like Olympic champion Sweden? Super riders on perfectly fit horses - theoretically everyone knows this simple recipe for success.