A PLACE higher than fifth and a medal for the team are Whitstable runner Charlotte Dale’s ambitions for the European Cross Country Championships.

The 18-year-old Invicta East Kent athlete runs for Great Britain in the junior women’s race at Medulin, Croatia, on Sunday.

Last year Dale finished fifth, leading Britain to the team silver medals, in Switzerland. She said: "I want to finish higher than last year.”

A member of the UK Athletics High Performance Centre at St Mary's College, Twickenham, Dale is joined by two other members of that silver-medal winning team, Lisa Dobriskey, of Ashford, and Freya Murray, of Edinburgh.

The rest of the team is Katrina Wootton (Bedford), Dani Barnes (Newquay) and Rachael Nathan (Lincoln).

Her top rivals all finished in front of Dale at the World Champion-ships in Dublin in March: Snezana Kostic (Yugoslavia), Galina Ignatyeva, of defending European champions Russia, Volha Minina (Belarus), Gwendoline Despres (France) and Adrienne Herzog (Holland).

Another Russian entrant, Galina Yegorova, has the best junior European 5,000m time this year, with 15min 57.23sec, compared with Dale’s 15:58.8.