British women take team silver at modern pentathlon championships
Great Britain took home team silver at last weekend’s women’s modern pentathlon world championships.
Katy Livingston, Heather Fell and Mhairi Spence repeated their performance at last year’s world championships in Budapest to collect team silver at the event in Crystal Palace on Sunday (16 August).
The German team of Lena Schoneborn, Eva Trautmann and Janine Kohlmann took gold. The Hungarian team came third.
Modern penthathlon includes five phases — shooting, fencing, swimming, show jumping and running.
“The whole set up here has been brilliant — all the officials and the way it’s been run,” said Heather Fell. “I think Britain should be proud of the way they’ve run the competition.”
Qian Chen became China’s first woman pentathlon world champion, winning individual gold.
“I’m very excited, I didn’t believe I could win today,” she said.
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Lithuania’s Laura Asadauskaite picked up silver while Germany’s Lena Schoneborn — current Olympic champion — took bronze.
Heather Fell came ninth individually and Mhairi Spence finished 14th.
“I was surprised when we got team silver, I thought we might have dropped down to bronze,” said Mhairi. “It’s always nice to win a medal and get on the podium.”
Olympic pentathlete Katy Livingston finished 23rd after falling in the riding phase.
Katy had won 29 out of 35 bouts of fencing and posted the fifth fastest time in the pool, and went into the riding in the lead.
She had gone clear until an alarm sounded to halt the round after judges noticed a pole had come out of one of the fences.
This distracted her horse who baulked at a jump and she fell, amassing 268 penalties.
“The horse lost its confidence in me and I lost confidence in it,” said Katy. “My fencing was my personal best, and my swim was almost a personal best, and I felt I was riding really well so I thought it couldn’t get any better.”
In the men’s championships (15 August) it was a clean sweep for Hungary who won the team and individual gold.
Adam Marosi took his first individual world championship.
“This year I have had the perfect season,” he said. “I have medalled in three out of three World cups, the European Championship and now this, the best, the World Championships. We are 100 per cent a strong nation for modern penthathlon — our secret is lots of training and hard work.”
David Svoboda from the Czech Republic took silver and Dmytro Kirpulyanskyy won bronze.
“It was an honour to represent my country on home soil and we had fantastic support,” Sam Weale
www.pentathlongb.org/mpwc
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A graduate of Exeter University, Amy joined our news team from Redpin Publishing in 2008 as news writer. She was promoted to deputy news editor in May 2013 and became news editor in April 2015. She left Horse & Hound in March 2016 to take up an editorial position in Dubai.