There were also top-10 finishes for Prentice's colleagues Lydia Rosling and Kate French, who came seventh and 10th respectively, while Kerry Prise, the youngest member of the team, finished a creditable 17th.

Hungary, for whom Sarolta Kovacs won the individual title, took the team gold with 15,892 points, 84 points ahead of Britain, with Germany's trio of Ronja Doring, Janine Kohlmann and Anika Schleu earning bronze with 15,612 points.

Today's results mean Britain's medal tally from the Championships now stands at three following the women's relay gold medal won by French, Prentice and Rosling on Monday's (September 19) opening day of competition in Drzonkow.

Prentice, who is fourth in the world junior rankings and has already achieved the London 2012 qualifying standard, produced a strong run/shoot to climb from ninth and secure a podium place.

Her 11min 37.19sec was the fastestrun/shoot time of the day.

She overtook Kohlmann to move into third place on the final leg of the run but couldn't quite chase down Poland's Joanna Gomolinska, who finished three seconds and 12 points ahead of the young Briton to take silver with 5416 points. Kovacs won by seven seconds, taking gold with a total of 5,444 points .

"I went into the combined event in ninth," said Prentice.

"Considering I'd had a good day all round up to that point I was a bit disappointed to start so low down.

"I could taste the silver medal in the end, but the Polish girl had her home crowd support and she just outsprinted me.

"The team did amazingly well too.

"We got a relay gold and a team silver – we couldn't really have asked for more coming out here.

"It's been a good championships for us."

With Prentice, Rosling and French nominated to score for the team event, Britain leapfrogged Germany to climb from third and take silver behind Hungary.

"We're pleased, we won an individual medal and a team medal and got three athletes in the top-10," said Istavan Nemeth, GB Women's head coach.

But he said there was also room for improvement.

"They didn't shoot as well as they could have today, if they had shot better we could have been celebrating more gold," he said.

Contact the writer of this story at [email protected]


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