Liam Heath and Jon Schofield claim canoe sprint K2 200m silver

Liam Heath and Jon Schofield produced a late salvo to claim silver in the kayak double 200m final at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games. The Great Britain pair claimed the team's first canoe sprint medal of the regatta by beating Lithuania to second place, behind race winners Spain.

Heath and Schofield won bronze at London 2012 and the result sees them upgrade that result from four years ago as Team GB's success on the water continues. The fastest qualifiers for the final initially got off to a slow start and were outside of the medal places at the half-way stage, before a last-minute surge saw them finish on the podium.

"It is so fast and furious you just put your head down and go for it and pop your head up at the end and you just wait for the scoreboard to come up," Heath, who will also competes in the K1 200m event later in the Games, told BBC Sport. "I could kind of tell that the Spanish were ahead of us but then our race was on the other side of the course compared to the others so I couldn't guess where we came.

"We gave it a bit of a lunge [at the end]. You see those white blocks and the finish line is about a foot in front of those and you just hit it as hard as you can and sometimes it can be the peak speed of the whole race."

Schofield added: "It is so satisfying. This guy is absolutely on fire in his K1, he's been killing me in training day-in, day-out I just didn't want to let him down. He's the best guy out there. There were better crews than us today but to get that is amazing."