Kate French of Great Britain produced a stirring laser‑run performance on a steamy night at the Tokyo Stadium to reel in the field and take gold in the modern pentathlon. French came to these Games having won the World Cup event this year but still vaguely haunted by her fifth spot in Rio five years ago. At 30 she has her moment of sporting ultimacy in one of the most taxing, mixed and undeniably strange disciplines at the Games. This was a thrilling act of endurance. In mid-afternoon French could be seen splashing her way up and down the holiday hotel-style pool in the baking heat of high-summer Tokyo. Five and half hours later she took the tape to win Britain’s 18th gold medal of these Olympics. The modern pentathlon is a brutal event, a reel of field sports crunched together into a facsimile of a day in the life of a 19th-century cavalry officer. You fence, you swim, you showjump. With the field unusually bunched in Tokyo the whole thing boiled down to the laser, four back‑to‑back 800‑metre runs, with three rounds of pistol shooting crammed in between the laps, a kind of Bourne franchise chase scene in Lycra shorts. With the skies dark over the Musashino Forest Sports Plaza, French started fifth on the overall standings in the final event, but only 15 seconds back from the leader, Uliana Batashova of the ROC. At which point she hit the ignition, catching Batashova after the opening 400m. By the time the field hit the second lap it was all French. She popped five out of five with the pistol, then produced a surge in the second 800m that effectively killed the race. In the end she was 15 points ahead of the London 2012 gold medallist Laura Asadauskaite, with Hungary’s Sarolta Kovacs in bronze. French collapsed for a moment on the track, then looked up in disbelief as the British contingent whooped and cheered. “I am just so thrilled right now,” she said. “It means so much. I was there in Rio when we broke the medal chain of British women getting Olympic medals, so I’m so pleased we got it back on track.” Asked if there had been time for this life-changing moment to sink in, she said: “I spoke to my husband, that was pretty emotional, I’d been holding it together quite well until I spoke to him. Now I need to speak to my mum.” French had kept herself in the main peloton all afternoon, with a key performance in the showjumping, the most hazardous of the five stages. Just ask Annika Schleu of Germany whose suffering, and indeed lack of control, on her horse Saint Boy made for one of the most distressing images of the Games. Schleu was leading after the fencing and swimming, 40 points ahead of French in eighth. At which point the German experienced a nightmare of human-equine disintegration, bursting into tears even before her round had started as Saint Boy backed away and whirled around. Schleu lost control, bawling, flourishing the whip and digging in her heels as her trainer yelled over the fence at horse and rider. Schleu took a few turns then barrelled straight through a jump with a horrible clonk. She exited the course, still distraught, on the back of a horse who must have been wondering what he had got himself into. Schleu dropped from first to 31st in that moment, her Games destroyed. Modern pentathletes are given a horse from a local pool. They get 20 minutes to make friends and get the feel of how their ride moves. After the event the president of the International Modern Pentathlon Union, Klaus Schormann, put the blame for Schleu’s collapse firmly on the rider. “The horses are absolutely excellent. We tested them, they are well prepared. There is no complaint. It is only the fault of the rider if they are not successful.” The distress caused will be a concern. This is a high-level sport. Finishing is every athlete’s obsession. But the horse has not signed up to be whipped and forced by a rider who has lost control of her emotions. Saint Boy did at least trot off quite happily at the end. The day had begun with the swimming heats, eight laps of a 25m pool constructed on site for the purpose of staging the whole event in the same stadium for the first time. French ended the round eighth overall. Then came the rapid-fire round-robin fencing, a kind of the Hundred version of the main competition the day before. The were few points on offer, but it made for a fine, if sweat‑soaked spectacle. The showjumping kicked off with a horrific fall in the opening round, Iêda Guimarães of Brazil going head‑first through a fence, getting back on, but ending up holding on with one hand for dear life down one side of the horse, like a cowboy avoiding six‑gun fire in a shootout. French emerged on Clntino at 6.41pm Tokyo time and went around clean with six time penalties to set up that final dash to gold. Afterwards she spoke about the trials of going 12 months without competing and the beneficial effects of the Tokyo 2020 postponement. “It was really, really tough at first being told we were locked down and couldn’t train, it was kind of a panic. It was a relief when it was delayed for a year.”