NISKAYUNA — When the Daily Double popped up for Charlotte Diffendale that day back in January as the Albany resident and postal carrier was in California taping a “Jeopardy” episode while wearing a marching-band jacket, she bet $5,800 — the full amount she’d won at that point.
It was the second round of the game, which aired Tuesday night, and Diffendale, playing seven years after she first took an online test to be a “Jeopardy” contestant, was in last place. Her big bet was based on a broad category for the Daily Double, “Two-word terms,” but Diffendale felt instant relief when she saw the clue: “Until the end of the 19th century, this name for a horse racing achievement was only used to describe the papal tiara.”
The Triple Crown, of course. Animals are important to Diffendale, horses especially. She twice went to the Belmont Stakes, one of the Triple Crown’s component races, with her father, the late Stephen Diffendale of Round Top in Greene County.
Diffendale was in second place going into the final round of “Jeopardy,” and that’s where she finished: in second, at $5,199. All three contestants answered incorrectly.
The category: “Medieval Places.”
The clue: “One of the participants in an 1170 event at this place said, ‘Let us away, knights; he will rise no more.'”
The answer: Canterbury Cathedral, where Archbishop Thomas Becket — about whom King Henry II had exclaimed, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest!” — was murdered by four of the king’s knights.
Diffendale said she answered incorrectly because, in studying English monarchies during the nearly 18 months between being notified she was in the contestant pool and being called for the “Jeopardy” taping in January, she’d gone back to the reign of Richard II (1377 to 1399) but inexplicably then jumped further back, to William the Conqueror (1066 to 1087).
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