It is more than two months since he broke the pole vault world record on the same night in the Ukraine which ended his indoor season.
But now Renaud Lavillenie is back for the summer with fresh ambition - as he makes his return to the sport in Des Moines, Iowa, with two competitions in three days.
The captivating Frenchman’s main event is the Drake Relays on Saturday but tonight he will return to the annual exhibition of the pole vaulting in the Mall in Jordan Creek town.
With crowds watching from all different vantage points of this shopping centre, Lavillenie will be greeted for the first time at an event as the world record-holder after his 6.16m in Donetsk in February.
When he was then trying to go even higher that evening, after breaking Sergey Bubka’s 21-year-old world record, Lavillenie fell badly and cut his foot, an injury which forced him out of the IAAF World Indoor Championships in Sopot last month.
With one record in the bag, now his aim will be the outdoor best of 6.14m which Bubka set in the altitude of Sestriere in July 1994.
His personal best outdoors is 6.02m but Lavillenie has made such an impact so far in 2014 that his attempt to improve his outdoor mark will now become one of the stories of the summer.
In Zurich, in August, he will be chasing a hat-trick of titles at the European Athletics Championships but there is more to him than just going over the bar.
On Sunday 4 May he will compete in both the long jump and 110m hurdles at the French Inter-clubs competition in Annecy, having shown his desire to spread his wings back in September when he made his debut at the decathlon in Talence and scored 6676 points.
Staying in the USA, if Lavillenie was one of the sport’s, let alone Europe’s, stories of the winter, so too was the Czech Republic’s 400m star Pavel Maslak who topped a brilliant indoor season with Sopot gold.
The European champion indoors and out, Maslak will be able to gauge his progress even more when he competes at the 40th Prefontaine Classic/Diamond League meeting on May 31 in Eugene.
Maslak will race against World champion LaShawn Merritt of the USA and Grenada’s Olympic champion Kirani James, along with Chris Brown, of the Bahamas, who finished second behind him in Sopot, and Belgian twins Kevin and Jonathan Borlée.