Katarina Johnson-Thompson moves into medal contention at World Athletics Championships
A ruptured Achilles eight months out from the Olympics combined with a calf injury after having made it back fit for Tokyo led her to believe her time as an elite athlete was up.
But in Budapest as the first British athlete in action at these World Athletics Championships, she showed there is still both plenty of ability and fight left.
In the lead-up to the Worlds, she likened the heptathlon to spinning plates. At the halfway point on day, she may not have quite been at her career best but she avoided those metaphoric plates crashing down around her as has been the past at some major championships.
Her time of 13.50seconds for the 100metre hurdles was fourth tenths slower than the personal best set on her way to being crowned world champion in Doha four years ago but also only her third quickest time for the event this season.
The jumping events have been her Achilles heel since that rupture on her take-off leg. She was never going to get close to her 1.98m PB set at the Rio Olympics, a clearance that would have been enough to win gold in the individual event.
But there was a danger of a dire high jump as she needed three attempts to clear 1.80m. She cleared it and got as high as 1.86m, still good enough to top the field to leave her in fourth place going into the evening session.
American Anna Hall, to whom Johnson-Thompson had finished runner-up at her only other heptathlon this year in Gotzis, is seen as the overwhelming favourite to become world champion.
But 10 years after her Liverpudlian rival made her own championship debut, the now 30-year-old Briton said she had belief she could push Hall and the rest of the field.
“I feel like anybody who’s won a major championship has the ability to say, ‘I’ve done it before therefore it can be done again’.”
Another Brit Laura Muir, who split from coach Andy Young at the start of the year, comfortably made her way out of her heat of the 1500m to finish second behind Sifan Hassan in a time of 4:03.50.
Afterwards, Muir said: “I felt really good and it’s just a matter of getting round with the least amount of bother. There’s always a bit scrapping and a bit of spiking and for me that felt comfortable and just did what I needed to do.”
But there was less good news for Jazmin Sawyers in the long jump as she failed to make it out of qualifying and into the final.
