GB just miss out on adding third medal to World Champs tally
25th August 2013
Britain’s pentathletes just missed out on adding a third medal to their Modern Pentathlon World Championships campaign haul when Samantha Murray and Joe Evans finished fourth in the mixed team relay today (Sunday).
Today’s competition followed a superb Saturday when the trio of Kate French, Samantha Murray and Mhairi Spence won women’s team gold and then Nick Woodbridge won an individual silver medal – Britain’s first men's individual Modern Pentathlon World Championships medal for 20 years.
Murray, the London 2013 Olympic silver medallist and 18-year-old Evans, competing at his first senior World Championships, battled hard throughout the day at the championships at Kaohsiung, Chinese Taipei.
Eighth after the fencing, they produced the fastest relay swim time of the day – 1:54.42 – to climb up the leaderboard into fourth place. They dropped 40 points from the maximum 1200 in the riding arena to go into the run/shoot in fourth place overall.
They crossed the line in second behind France in the combined event, but then incurred a 10-second penalty on a kit protocol issue, relegating them to fourth. They missed bronze by just four seconds. An appeal on the basis that the UIPM rules says the penalty should have been imposed at the start of the run/shoot rather than after the event was rejected.
“They competed well today and earned second place in the field of play, so it was disappointing to see them in fourth,” said Jan Bartu, Pentathlon GB Performance Director. "There are two more relays coming up and it would be great to bring home another medal."
Kate French, Freyja Prentice and Mhairi Spence represent Great Britain tomorrow (Monday) in the women’s relay, the penultimate competition of the championships.
The British team train at the Pentathlon GB high performance centre at the University of Bath.
Mixed relay results
Gold: France (Elodie Clouvel & Valentin Belaud) – 5852 points
Silver: Latvia (Elena Rublevska & Deniss Cerkovskis) – 5824 points
Bronze: Ukraine (Iryna Khoklova & Pavlo Tymoshchenko) – 5816 points
4th: Great Britain (Samantha Murray & Joe Evans) – 5800 points
GB team medals
Gold: women’s team - Samantha Murray, Mhairi Spence & Kate French
Silver: men’s individual – Nick Woodbridge