A local athlete has qualified for the Junior World Championships for the Modern Pentathlon and is currently in Cairo, Egypt for the worldwide competition taking place this week.
Reed Dove, 16, is one of four members of the U.S. squad competing in the five-phase event combining shooting, swimming, running, fencing and equestrian for an all-around athletic test.
Dove, son of Ceil and Scott Dove of Flint Hill, is a rising junior at Rappahannock High School.
A former U.S. Pony Club and international tetrathlon champion, Dove is the youngest member of his team; the junior championship teams are open to contestants aged 19-21.
Brother Jenkins, 19, is also a winning pentathlete, having placed in the junior nationals last year and taken two summer's worth of clinics at the U.S. Olympic headquarters in Colorado. Jenkins Dove is a rising junior at the University of Virginia, attending on a full athletic and academic scholarship.
Baron Pierre de Coubertin founded the modern pentathlon believing the event would produce the ideal, complete athlete. In fact, the Olympic symbol of five rings represent the five-phase competition as well as representing the five major regions of the world competing in the Games (Africa, the Americas, Asia, Europe and Oceania.)
The phases of the modern pentathlon were designed to test a "Napoleonic courier," a military runner who may have to run, swim or ride his way across country, defending himself in a variety of ways to carry an important missive cross-country to allies or from a battlefront to officers in the rear.
Competitors earn points for their performances in each of the five disciplines in the one-day competition. At the junior world championship level, the shooting phase is on 20 targets with an air pistol and pellets. The swimming phase is 200 meters (freestyle.) The run is 3000 meters (about 2 1/2 miles.) The fencing is an "epee" competition in which every competitor faces every other competitor, one on one, in a "one touch" one minute bout.
The show jumping phase, considered hardest for many competitors most of whom did not have an equestrian background, is a course of 12 fences set at 3'7" – similar to a preliminary level three-day event.
In the riding phase, competitors ride "borrowed" horses loaned to the event by owners in the area. Athletes get just 20 minutes aboard their mount to warm-up; practice fences are limited to five, total.
Scores are kept in each phase, with the top three overall declared the winners. A competitor can win a pentathlon without placing first in any one phase.