LONDON 2012 runners-up Hannah Mills and Saskia Clark claimed silver for Great Britain today at the 470 World Championships in the Israeli port city of Haifa.

After a difficult penultimate race day, the British pair faced an uphill battle to try and wrest gold from the grip of Austria’s defending champions Lara Vadlau and Jolanta Ogar, who started the final 10-boat medal race with a near insurmountable 18-point lead.

The British duo had to win the race and hope the Austrians finished 10th or lower to overtake them on the top step of the podium.

It was a tall order but 2012 world champions Mills and Clark took on the fight and played their part to seal an emphatic medal race victory.

At one stage, Vadlau and Ogar were placed 10th and British gold looked a possibility, but the Santander 2014 world champions pulled back through the fleet to finish the race fourth and retain their overall lead.

Mills, based on Portland, was happy with their final day’s efforts: “We had a great medal race today.

“We really wanted to just have a strategy and execute it well.

“We did that and so it was really nice to get the confidence of being able to do that in a pressure situation. “It was exciting – at one point the Austrians were right at the back so that would have given us the gold, but to be honest it all slipped away from us yesterday.

“We didn’t nail our starts well enough and got stuck in the middle of the course too much. Unfortunately that’s what lost it for us.” Weymouth resident Clark added: “For a brief second there around the leeward marks we might have been world champions, but the Austrians caught up so it wasn’t to be.

“It was good to end on a high winning the medal race and improve on a few mistakes we made at the Rio Test Event medal race. “Overall we’re really disappointed with our day yesterday, that’s where we lost it, so we’ll go away, have a proper debrief and think about what went wrong and come back a bit stronger and more solid.”

France’s Camile Lecointre and Helena Defrance completed the women’s podium positions, keeping New Zealand’s Olympic champions Jo Aleh and Polly Powrie at bay.

Portland-based Luke Patience and Elliot Willis were also in action in the men’s finale, but were out of contention for the podium positions ahead of the final race.

They concluded their regatta in 10th place overall.

“Our medal race was a disappointing end to a challenging week,” said Willis. “We’ll take lots from it. “It’s been off the back of an otherwise pretty successful season and we’ve got plenty to work on looking forward.”

Patience added: “We’ve had quite good upwind speed this week. We had a new boat out and it seems to be performing quite nicely upwind so that’s been alright, and we’ve been starting reasonably well on the whole and creating options. “But the downwinds are where we’ve been losing places. That’s probably the bit that’s standing out the most as an area that we’re wanting to change and work on and improve.

“That’s let us down really. We’ve been in really good positions at top marks to capitalise on and have not.”

The men’s victory went to Australia’s Mat Belcher and Will Ryan, with Croatia’s Sime Fantela and Igor Marenic in second place and Russia’s Pavel Sozykin and Denis Gribanov in third.

Elsewhere at the 470 worlds, Jess Lavery-Eilidh McIntyre and Amy Seabright-Anna Carpenter were 32nd and 34th respectively in the women’s fleet.

Full results are available at 2015worlds.470.org For news and British Sailing Team updates visit britishsailingteam.com, on Facebook or on Twitter @BritishSailing.