BY KAREN BOSSICK
Adrienne Lyle, who trained for years in Hailey, won a silver medal Tuesday at the Tokyo Olympics.
Lyle was part of a U.S. Equestrian Team that won silver in the Grand Prix Special. She and her horse Salvino, a 2007 Hanoverian stallion with an appetite for bananas, scored a 76.109 percent in the competition.
She will have the opportunity to compete for an individual medal in the Freestyle event on Wednesday. She placed 37th in the individual final at the 2012 London Olympics.
As expected, the German team won gold Tuesday. The Germans have won the team final in nine of the last 10 Olympics, missing out only in the 2012 Olympics in London where they won silver. Great Britain took bronze, losing out to Lyle and her teammates Steffen Peters and Sabine Schut-Kery, who posted respective scores of 77.776 percent and 81.596 percent
The U.S. dressage team has won bronze medals in five of the last seven Olympics. This is the first time they’ve won a silver medal in the Grand Prix Special since the 1948 Summer Olympics.
Lyle, 36, trained under two-time Olympic equestrian Debbie McDonald at River Grove Farm in Hailey. McDonald, now the technical advisor for the U.S. Equestrian Dressage team, has guided three athletes and their horses to the Olympics since 2012.
She says this year’s group is one of the strongest the United States has had since she started doing dressage.
McDonald rode Brentina to a team bronze at the Athens 2004 Games and team silver and bronze medals at the 2002 and 2006 World Equestrian Games. They were the first Americans to win a World Cup Dressage Finals Champion’s title in 2003.
Lyle is one of five athletes with Idaho connections in the Tokyo Olympics. The others include 400-meter runner Jordin Andrade, representing Cape Verde and Lewis-Clark State College alum and coach Sam Atkin, who is running the 10,000-meter run for Great Britain.
The other two are University of Idaho graduate Alycia Butterworth, a British Columbia native who will represent Canada in the 3,000-meter steeplechase, and Liga Velvere, who won eight WAC championships while running for the Idaho Vandals. She will represent Latvia, where she is a 13-time national champion, in the 800-meter run.
EDITOR'S NOTE: Adrienne Lyle withdrew from the Individual Final on Wednesday because "Salvino did not feel his usual self."