Ennis falls short
Jessica Ennis was forced to settle for silver in the defence of her pentathlon title at the World Indoor Championships in Istanbul.
Ennis led by 86 points after the 60 metre hurdles and 109 following the high jump, but saw her lead cut to just 10 points despite a new personal best in the shot.
A sub-par performance in the long jump, where jumps of 6.19m and 6.18m were followed by a foul in the final round, then left Ennis 93 points behind Ukraine's Olympic champion Nataliya Dobrynska - who won the long jump with 6.57m - going into the final event.
That meant the 26-year-old needed to beat Dobrynska by a sizeable margin over 800m and she came agonisingly close thanks to a new personal best of two minutes 08.09 seconds, with Dobrynska just over three seconds behind in third.
Dobrynska set a new indoor world record of 5,013 points, with Ennis recording a new personal best just 48 points behind. Lithuania's Austra Skujyte was third.
Ennis had made an ideal start with victory in the 60m hurdles in a time of 7.91 seconds - her second fastest ever - but was disappointed to clear only 1.87m in the high jump - and that with her final attempt.
A personal best of 14.79m in the shot kept her in the lead after the morning session, but a poor long jump left the Sheffield athlete with a mountain to climb to avoid a second straight defeat.
Ennis has now lost her two world titles in the space of seven months and admitted: "I need to make sure I learn from these experiences, get it right and turn silver into gold this summer."
And she also revealed she briefly thought she had won gold when her name flashed up first on the scoreboard before Dobrynska's points from the 800m had been added to her total.
"It's the worst feeling in the world," Ennis added. "I just had to run my heart out, my plan was to stay with (Karolina) Tyminska and I did that and just literally glanced up and saw my name in first position and thought I've won it and [then had] the excitement and then obviously the devastation to know I was second."
