Weale finishes 19th in Hungary

Sam Weale was the highest placed of the British men at the third Modern Pentathlon World Cup event of the year in Hungary.

Weale finished 19th as Italy's Nicola Benedetti claimed victory.

Beijing 2008 Olympian Weale, who went into the competition ranked 22nd in the world, was 10th going into the run/shoot at Szazhalombatta.

But a disappointing first shoot saw him slip down the leaderboard, and despite a 10-second second shoot, he was unable to claw his way back up the field.

Team-mate Jamie Cooke, Britain's world junior champion, finished 25th.

Jan Bartu, Pentathlon GB performance director, said: "The competition was very unforgiving today. The field is so equal now and there are so many good athletes."

Weale, who finished seventh in the last World Cup in Rio last month, won 17 of his fencing bouts for 15th place, while Cooke started the day with 10 wins for 33rd place.

Cooke's 200m freestyle swim time of 1min 51.14secs was the second fastest of the day, propelling him to 22nd overall. Weale's 2:01.06 was 14th quickest and was enough to keep him in 15th place overall going into the ride.

Weale made further progress up the leaderboard in the riding arena. He had just one fence down and also accumulated some time penalties to add 1,172 pentathlon points from the maximum 1,200 available from the ride to his total score. Cooke had two fences down but also had some time penalties to add 1,148 to his score.

That meant Weale went into the run/shoot in 10th place, 48 seconds behind leader Andrei Moiseev, of Russia, with Cooke in 23rd and starting a further 25 seconds back.

Benedetti climbed from seventh in the run/shoot to take the gold, but Weale dropped down to end the day in 19th with a run/shoot time of 10:58.35, while Cooke 10:46.49 saw him finish 25th.

The fourth round of the World Cup takes place this coming week in Rostov, Russia.