AIMEE WILLMOTT may have finished outside the medals for a second final in a row but she has declared her 2018 season a success at the European Swimming Championships.

After narrowly missing out on a bronze medal in the women’s 400m individual medley, the Middlesbrough swimmer switched attention to the shorter 200m – her secondary event.

She battled through to last night’s final with a pair of gutsy performances in the heat and semi-final but the opposition was too strong in the battle for gold and she finished seventh – almost three seconds off gold medallist Katinka Hosszu of Hungary.

It brings the curtain down on a fine year for Willmott, who became Commonwealth Games champion in April over 400m.

And now she is already looking ahead to next year and the World Championships, followed by the Olympics in Tokyo a year after.

“This season has been great for me,” she said.

“It’s been a bit difficult as well, not having the last back-half of the season to build on so I will just start pretty much from scratch again in September with rehab, getting back into training and getting fit and moving again properly.

“But I had a really successful Commonwealth Games and I knew this [European Championships] was always going to be tougher off the back of that, and I haven’t had the easiest run up in the last couple of weeks, so to come and swim pretty alright - I’m pretty chuffed with that.”

Willmott stayed with Hosszu and Great Britain teammate Siobhan-Marie O’Connor down the first 100m and looked in contention for a medal as she approached the final freestyle leg.

But the 25-year-old ran out of gas and could not hold on down the final stretch of the race.

“I’m a little bit disappointed that it was slightly slower again than the heat and the semi-final, but I think knowing that I had to go pretty much as fast as I could in the morning to make it back and beat the other two is something I’m not really used to,” she added.

“I had to really push hard to get through and that maybe took it out of me but it’s time to start planning for next year.”

Elsewhere, Teessider Rabah Yousif suffered an agonising exit from the men’s 400m on the track in Berlin, as he ran a season’s best time of 45.30 but finished tenth in the semi-finals, just outside of qualifying.

The 31-year-old had set his previous season’s best when he took second at the British Championships last month, and now looks to the 4x400m relay in hope of a third European medal.

“It was not good enough, not good enough,” said Yousif. “I felt good coming into this Championship, I just don’t know what happened.

“Maybe I went off a bit too fast, but I did my best and my best wasn’t good enough today.

“I move on and I learn, and I see what is going to happen in the future. I still have the relay to go.”

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