Kate French achieved the best result of her modern pentathlon career to date as she narrowly missed out on a medal by finishing fourth on her World Cup Final debut in Florida.
French, who trains at the Pentathlon GB National Training Centre at the University of Bath, was edged out of the podium places by just ten seconds as Poland's Oktawia Nowacka claimed gold. Lithuania's London 2012 Olympic champion Laura Asadauskaite won silver ahead of China's Qian Chen.
Athletes qualify for the World Cup Final through their performances at the World Cup series events throughout the season.
French's sixth at the World Cup in Chengdu, China in April had been the best individual performance of her career and helped earn her a place at the World Cup Final in Sarasota for the first time.
And despite focussing training on next month's European Championships and the World Championships at the start of September, world number 14 French produced a strong all-round performance in Florida.
Pentathlon GB performance director Jan Bartu said: "Fourth was a fantastic result, especially as Kate is in full training at this point and there was no special preparation for this competition.
"It was another very promising performance by Kate. She was competing against some really fierce athletes in Sarasota and was very close to breaking into the medals."
French made a strong start to her World Cup Final debut, with the 23-year-old winning 21 of her 34 fencing bouts.
That put her in joint seventh place with 226 pentathlon points and she rose two places after the 200m freestyle swim, with her time of 2mins 14.72secs the 12th fastest of the day and adding 296 points to her total.
French followed that up with a decent performance in the riding arena, where she dropped just seven points from the maximum 300, and that was enough to see her go into the final run/shoot event in second place.
Although she could not hold on to that position, her time of 13:25.00 was still enough to earn the best result of her career to date.
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