On the back of an extraordinary year, it can sometimes be difficult to replicate the past.
But in Paris on Wednesday night, Nafissatou Thiam showed that might not be the case as Belgium’s Olympic heptathlon champion opened her winter season in brilliant fashion.
Thiam, whose Rio success led to her being named as the Golden Tracks Female Rising Star at the European Athletics awards night last October, won the triathlon at the Meeting de Paris indoor – and had an overall personal best among her performances.
She began the evening with a long jump of 6.32m before producing a shot put of 15.35m, the best distance she has ever reached, indoors or out.
It’s some improvement from her old indoor best of 14.80m from 2015, while her furthest outdoors is 15.24m, also from two years ago.
Then at the Palais Omnisports, Thiam, 22, ran 8.45 for the 60m hurdles, a time which was just 0.02 off her quickest for a combined total of 2861 points as she beat France’s Antoinette Nana Djimou (2825) and the Netherland’s Nadine Broersen (2761).
Ahead lies another big season, with the European Athletics Indoor Championships in Belgrade now just days away, and even with just these three events in Paris, Thiam has proved she is going to be right up there again.
It was two years ago at the European indoors in Prague that Thiam showed what to expect when she won silver in the pentathlon with a personal best of 4696 behind Great Britain’s Katarina Johnson-Thompson’s championship record of 5000.
But her Olympic gold has elevated the Belgian to a new level in a year where she will also seek world championship glory in London in August.
In Rio, Thiam broke the national record and set the world-leading mark with 6810 to beat Britain’s defending Olympic champion Jessica Ennis-Hill by 35 points, breaking five personal bests along the way.