It is 50 days until the start of the European Athletics Championships in Amsterdam - one of the showpiece sporting occasions of the summer.
Between 6-10 July, the Netherlands will stage the event for the first time, the 23rd occasion the championships have been held.
To mark this landmark date, today we begin a countdown to the championships with a look back at some of the greatest moments, greatest stories and greatest characters from 82 years of a competition that was launched in Turin in 1934 with 23 nations and 226 athletes.
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And where else to start but with the most famous Dutch athlete in history… Fanny Blankers-Koen.
Only once have the European Athletics Championships been set in two different venues in the same year - the 1938 edition. The men’s competition took place in Paris at the start of September and the women’s event was staged in Vienna, a fortnight later.
And it was there that a name would emerge on the podium who would become known across the world.
Born in Baarn in 1918, Koen had competed at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, where she was joint sixth in the high jump and fifth in the 4x100m relay.
By the time of the European Athletics Championships two years later, she won the first major medals of her career.
Still known as Fanny Koen - she was not to marry her husband, coach Jan Blankers, until 1940 - she won bronze in both the 100m (12.0) and 200m (24.9), behind Poland’s Stanislawa Walasiewicz (11.9, 23.8) and Germany’s Kathe Klauss (12.0, 24.4) in both races.
World War II cast a dark cloud over international sport but when the European Athletics Championships resumed in Oslo in 1946, Blankers-Koen, now a prolific breaker of records, won gold in the 80m hurdles and 4x100 relay. The 1948 London Olympics saw her dubbed The Flying Housewife as she won four golds (100m, 200m 80m hurdles and 4x100m relay) - before the 1950 European Athletics Championships in Brussels where she won three more titles (100m, 200m and 80m hurdles) and silver in the 4x100m relay.
Vienna in 1938 had been her medal breakthrough and how fitting with the championships now heading to the Netherlands, that the host nation has a brilliant woman sprinter again in Dafne Schippers.