Nick Woodbridge fights for Olympic dream

Shropshire Olympic hopeful Nick Woodbridge expects the fight for modern pentathlon places at the London games to go right down to the wire and has vowed to do everything he can to make the British team.

With a maximum of two men and two women eligible to represent each country this summer, the competition for those spots is guaranteed to be fierce.

Britain's women's team is traditionally very strong, with four medals won from the last three Olympics, but there are big hopes for the men this time around with Woodbridge, Jamie Cooke and Sam Weale all having proved themselves on the world stage.

World junior champion Cooke, 20, is the only one of the trio to have achieved the qualifying standard thus far, with Woodbridge and Weale now targeting a top-three spot at the World Championships in Rome in May to avoid having to rely on the rankings list.

Woodbridge, from New Works in Telford, had hoped to achieve the 2012 standard last year after winning bronze at the World Cup Final Olympic test event but a lack of consistency proved his Achilles heel.

He said: "Ranking points is a back-up but the World Championships is closer so that's what I'll be focusing on."

The pressure of trying to qualify for the Games is not new to the 25-year-old, who claimed the very last spot at Beijing four years ago.

"I think I was ranked 36th in the world at that point and now I'm 11th, so I'm way further up, and as long as I can maintain that then I'm in a good position.

"I don't think it will be a case of having two guys there, it'll be which two guys. It's a fight-off."

The trio will all be in action at the first two World Cups of the season in the USA and Brazil in March, where the chance to claim valuable ranking points will begin in earnest.

Woodbridge knows it is now or never, and he added: "Everyone's been counting down 1,000 days, 500 days and asking me what that means and it hasn't really meant a lot until this year, and now you think, 'Right, we're in 2012, this is it.'"