Today the CBC Sports headline read, “Eric Lamaze takes home gold in Olympic individual show jumping.”  I watched the event on NBCOlympics.com, as the story of an athlete’s comeback from drug problems raced to its heart-stopping conclusion.  Lamaze and his horse Hickstead were locked in a timed jump-off with Sweden’s Rolf-Goran Bengtsson and Ninja. The course was shortened, with tight turns and trappy combinations. The Swede and his horse ended the speed run with 4 faults. But Lamaze and Hickstead were having one of those once-in-a-lifetime moments — clearing the fences with air to spare, taking the last one at a risky angle to shave off a micro-second of time.  Afterwards Lamaze and his panting horse were the center of a backstage frenzy of applause and congratulations.

It was “focus on females” as the network honed into synchronized swimming, more gymnastics and the individual dressage finals. While the frenzied Phelps medal race was on, the Netherlands’ Anky van Grunsven has been quietly pursuing her third Olympic gold. This is a huge achievement in dressage, where you can’t pile up medals the way you can in swimming.  In all Olympic history, no individual rider has collected more than two golds.  Van Grunsven and Germany’s Isabell Werth, the two grandes dames, have been dueling for years.

An Outsports reader from Canada asked if we were ever going to mention his country. As of today, the Maple Leaf Nation has yet to win a medal. Even Togo has won a medal. But Canada came up big-time on the Oxygen broadcast of show jumping today.This was the qualifying round, where horses and riders have to show the organizers that they know what a grand-prix jump course is about. So many new countries are entering equestrian sport that everybody wants to make sure they’re experienced enough to compete.  The 550-meter course was beautiful - very Chinese, with jumps that incorporate a fan shape or moon bridge, and two dragons flanking one vertical - all of them just tricky enough to make a horse pay attention.

The Summer Olympics just keep getting bigger. There are 302 gold medals up for grabs in Beijing. That’s a gold medal every 47 minutes for the sixteen-day span of the games. Doesn’t sound so special when it’s put that way, does it? But is that BMX gold medal really as significant as the historic one Michael Phelps won last night? No, and there are good reasons why. Follow the jump for an in-depth analysis of the most valuable gold medals and the sports that don’t even deserve to be in the Olympics.

The Germans continue to absolutely dominate in dressage.  Isabell Werth is a grande dame with piles of world championships and five Olympic golds, including this new one.  Watching her negotiate the grand prix test on her 12-year-old gelding Satchmo, I was struck by her image of confident traditional female in top hat and snow-white stock tie.  She was guiding her horse-shaped universe with such complete invisible control that she looked like a statue in a park.  We’ve gotten so used to seeing high profile women like Britney Spears come unglued on TV — even the spectacle of our U.S. female gymnasts struggling so nakedly with all their emotions and nerves in Beijing — that it’s startling to see a woman who projects such an opposite image.

1st day Eventing Dressage. An opportunity to glimpse the significant ripple made in a sport by one of its most distinguished out gay horsemen, namely Blyth Tait of New Zealand. Blyth has been out for many years and is held in high regard nationally in his country, much like Robert Dover here in the U.S. The first time Outsports mentioned Blyth was during Athens 2004, where he competed in eventing. This time he is managing the NZL eventing team. His presence at Beijing underlines the importance of out sportspeople in key roles off the field.

Jim B. was joking with me the other day that I could post whatever I wanted to about the Olympics, but to lay off the pictures of British equestrians. Well, I never!

Realizing that I knew squat about the equestrian competition, I took a poke around some websites and found out that, as I expected, this is not a sport for the working class. It’s damn expensive to care for multiple horses, house them, get them to competitions and so forth. More than that, though, I found out that at Olympic level, there’s three competitions involving humans and horses: