She can’t quite compete with 40-year-old Jo Pavey in the age-stakes, but Spain’s Ruth Beitia at 35 is getting there and has the medals to show for it.
For an athlete who is supposed to have retired two years ago after winning her first major gold at the last European Athletics Championships in Helsinki, she is doing a fair imitation of just embarking on the best part of her career.
So here she is back in action and with as good a chance as ever of retaining her title on Sunday to become only the second female high jumper in 52 years to do so at these championships.
The omens, it has to be said, are good if the weather has anything to do with it: “It started to pour down when we started to warm up, then the sun came out,” she told the Spanish press after qualifying.
“It reminded me a lot of Helsinki where it was cold, then hot, windy and rainy.”
After 24 years of an international career, another final will be all in a day’s work for Beitia as well as her coach for all of those years, RamónTorralbo.
She paid tribute to one of the longest running partnerships in sport: “I have the great good luck that with Ramón everything is easy,” she said.
“He has taught me everything I know. My medals are as much his as mine.”
It seems superfluous to state the obvious, but Beitia will be doing her best to get in amongst the medals once again in the Letzigrund: “I’m in form to be in with a shout of a medal,” she says. “And to stand on the top of the podium would be amazing.
“My jumps have gone great and I have a very good feeling about this.”
All in all, there have been 10 major medals hung around Beitia’s neck and the last three have come in a bit of a rush after she was supposed to have retired two years ago.In one sense, she almost seems more successful than she was before her ghost retirement, but she has no doubt about the reason for that: “One day it occurred to me that sometimes you put unnecessary pressure on yourself and when you let yourself relax you can do so much more.”
Since the bitter disappointment of fourth at the London Olympics, she has won European indoors gold, taken world bronze in Moscow and another bronze in the world indoors in Sopot.
But the medal that gave her most pleasure was the silver she won at the European Athletics Indoor Championships in Madrid 2005, “in front my own public.”
So what chance of retirement now? When she was asked at a special awards ceremony in Madrid after her latest medal exploit she replied: “I’m taking it day by day. I don’t know what my body is going to tell me tomorrow. One thing is for sure, I would like to retire because it is my own decision, not because of injury.”
The Ruth Beitia road show keeps rolling on.