Hanna Melnychenko will find herself in a new position when the IAAF World Indoor Championships take place in Sopot next month - as the gold medallist the rest have to beat.
A year on from finishing third at the European Athletics Indoor Championships in Gothenburg, Ukrainian Melnychenko is flourishing as a world champion after her heptathlon glory in Moscow last summer.
And from two podium finishes in 2013, the immediate future looks good for Melnychenko after a winter where she has so far achieved personal bests in both the 60m hurdles and shot put.
Melnychenko leads the women’s pentathlon field for these World Indoor Championships in which the multi-event entrants are decided by invite only.
There will be an extremely strong European presence with Belarusian Yana Maksimava, Nadine Broersen, of the Netherlands, Ukrainian champion Alina Fyodorova and Poland’s Karolina Tyminska.
Melnychenko made 2013 a year she would never forget, starting with her excellent pentathlon in Gothenburg where she scored 4604 points as France’s Ida Antoinette Nana Djimou won gold with 4666 and Maksimava finished second with 4658.
By the time of Moscow, she was among the contenders, if not the favourite, for the heptathlon, but produced the performance of her life with 6586 to beat Canada’s Brianne Theisen-Eaton by 56 points.
And now she has raised her level of consistency once again with her new best marks this winter, both on January 27 in Zaporizhzhya, where she ran 8.20 in the 60m hurdles and launched the shot 14.19m. In comparison, she clocked 8.27 for the hurdles and threw the shot a distance of 13.82m in Gothenburg.
The men’s heptathlon in Sopot will feature Europe’s two multi-event champions - the Netherlands' Eelco Sintnicolaas, who won gold indoors in Sweden, and Germany’s Pascal Behrenbruch, the decathlon champion from the European Athletics Championships in Helsinki in 2012.
They will face the leading man in America’s Ashton Eaton, the World and Olympic decathlon champion, who is defending a gold medal he won in Istanbul two years ago with a world indoor record of 6645.
While that mark might be out of reach for many, Sintnicolaas has set the standard for 2014 as he leads the world lists with his 6282 from the Dutch national championships in Apeldoorn last weekend.
Germany’s Kai Kazmirek, who won gold in the decathlon at the European Athletics Under-23 Championships in Tampere in July of last year, will also try to prove his worth on the senior stage in Poland.