Saskia Clark is aiming for gold at the 470 World Championships in Israel.

Olympic silver medallist Clark, from Mersea Island, along with helm Hannah Mills will begin their challenge today as other nations and sailors vie for remaining qualifying berths for the Rio 2016 Games.

For both Mills and Clark the Olympic selection battle is over, having already confirmed their places on the sailing start line for Great Britain next year.

But with country quota places and individual qualifying spots still up for grabs among the worldwide fleet, Mills is expecting a tough battle as they join 42 other female crews in the world title chase in Haifa.

She said: “There’s certainly a lot of chat about countries getting qualified for the Games so it’s a massive event for a lot of people both for country qualification and for individual selection places as well.

“It’s certainly a big event and everyone’s looking to peak for this event throughout the year. We’ll definitely need to be on our best game to be in with a shout of the medals.

“Our selection maybe lets a teeny bit of pressure off for this event now, but for us we’re looking at it as the last big event for our 2015 season so we still want to go out and put on our best performance.

“It’s still a World Championship and you don’t get the chance to try and get on the podium or win them very often. We’ll certainly be going out there with that in our minds.”

Clark added: “Because of the logistics of getting here, some of the smaller nations haven’t come like they would come to a European venue, but all the teams we see as our main competitors for next year are here so from that perspective (the focus) doesn’t change that much.

“It’s important for us – you want to race against them and race against the best and keep improving your skills and that’s what we’ll be focussed on next week.”

The British Sailing Team duo won the world title in 2012 and earned a bronze medal at the 2014 in Santander, but feel they are in a better place in their campaign now than 12 months ago.

“It would be fair to say we didn’t feel anywhere near our best last year at Santander,” Clark said.

“We were still a bit rusty from the time we took out following the Games and hadn’t quite got into our rhythm yet for this cycle.

“That’s definitely not the case now. We’ve had a great year training and racing since Santander and, touch wood, we’ve been injury free which had been a bit of a problem in the past.

“So we’re pretty raring to go and race these Worlds.”

Racing at the 470 World Championships gets underway today, with the final medal races for the top ten crews scheduled for next Saturday.