PENTATHLON - 1994

Director: Bruce Malmuth
Cast: Dolph Lundgren, David Soul, Renee Coleman, Roger E. Mosley.

DOLPH'S THOUGHTS:
In 1993 I was approached by the US Pentathlon Association, part of the United States Olympics Committee. There were two athletes on the U.S. Pentathlon team, who had this idea of making a movie about pentathlon to help the sport get more recognition for the '96 Olympic.

These two guys had both been competing in Barcelona in '92 and they had this idea of a story of an East German Pentathlete who moves to the west, has problems adjusting to his new life and decides to have a comeback and compete in the Olympics for his new country U.S.A.

It was a fun project to work on. We did a lot of training with top athletes. Pentathlon is fencing, shooting, swimming, horseback riding and running. I got to do the five sports and I had the opportunity to train with some of the best athletes in the world in these fields. It was a pleasure of course, to get in touch with my old athletic background and it also motivated me to later become Team Leader for the US '96 Pentathlon Team in the Atlanta Olympics.

There was one funny moment in the production because we had a horse-jumping event; they had to find a horse big enough to make me look good. (I'm 6'5 – 195cm tall). Some of these jumping horses are quite small. So they found the biggest horse in California! It was a German bread jumping horse and it was extremely big and powerful. Even the real riders couldn't deal with him. They had to give him some injections to calm him down for the movie.

But when we got out there in front of the cameras, of course it looked like a real jumping event, the horse thought it was a competition, so he got even more worked up. Finally somehow I managed to get a few jumps. I got thrown a couple of times, not on camera. The producers fortunately did not know about it, they probably would have let somebody else do the riding.