European Championships 2018: Katarina Johnson-Thompson wins silver medal as Matthew Hudson-Smith takes gold

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Long seen as the nearly woman of the heptathlon, Katarina Johnson-Thompson produced the performance of her lifetime to narrowly miss out on European heptathlon gold.

Just 57 points separated her and Nafi Thiam after two days and seven events of competition, in so doing Johnson-Thompson putting to bed any demons and silencing any doubters.

On a night when Britain won gold courtesy of Matthew Hudson-Smith in the 400m and two bronze with Jake Wightman in the 1500m and 400m hurdler Meghan Beesley, Johnson-Thompson’s was the one performance against the world’s very best.

In a field made up of virtually all the world’s top heptathletes, Johnnson-Thompson recorded a career best 6,759 points, more than any of the tallies Jessica Ennis-Hill, the athlete to which she has long been compared, had amassed in winning her three world titles.

It capped the season of her career, European silver added to pentathlon gold at the World Indoors in March as well as the Commonwealth title a year on. Despite the silver lining, this was undoubtedly the stand-out performance.

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She said: “Up until this point, these championships, I wasn’t as confident as I am coming out of them. This is one of my best performances ever. I’m happy with that. And I feel like I’m onto something, I’m satisfied with the performance but I definitely want more.”

Having habitually come up short at World and Olympic level, Johnson-Thompson said she now had the belief of toppling the world’s leading multi-eventer: “I feel like I can do it. I believe in myself and this is going to be good for me moving forwards.”

Johnson-Thompson had begun day two of the event with an 87-point advantage and extended that by another 26 following a 6.68metre long jump, her best at a major championships.

Too often, she has been undone by the javelin but, in her bogey event, achieved a personal best of 42.16m.

The only problem was that, for every time she pushed her limits, Thiam followed suit, a 6.60m long jump and a championship record 57.91m turning the lead on its head.

It left her with a 192-point deficit, the equivalent of nearly 13.5 seconds in the last event, the 800m. And, although she went for it from the gun and was 10s clear at the line, she came up just short as Thiam completed the clean sweep of Olympic, world and European titles.

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But it required the Belgian to record a world-leading 6,816 and her best ever score at a major championships.

Since Hudson-Smith won European silver four years ago he has been riddled with injuries but he was a class apart in the men’s 400m, running a stunning bend to leave him well clear of the field.

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He tired in the home straight coming nearly half-a-second off breaking Iwan Thomas’ British record of 44.36s, which had existed for 21 years, and the European record of 44.33, which was set when the Berlin Wall still stood.

It did, though, make amends for a woeful Commonwealth Games in which he was disqualified for coming out of his lane in the heats of the 400m and then was injured in the relay.

"It's a good feeling,” he said. “The time doesn't matter, that's for the future. It was about winning and going on in the future. Times will come, I went for it and tried something new.”

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Beesley picked up a surprise bronze medal from lane one in the 400m hurdles behind gold medallist Léa Sprunger as Eilidh Doyle produced a lacklustre race to finish in dead last. It was the first time any British athlete had finished in front of Doyle for five years.

The British trio of Wightman, Chris O’Hare and Charlie Grice had all been in the mix going into the home straight of the 1500m but they were pipped to the line by 17-year-old Ingebrigtsen, at 17 the youngest of the three Norwegian brothers in the final as Wightman hung on for bronze.

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