It is 15 years since a teenage Nelson Evora won long jump gold at the European Youth Olympic Festival in Murcia, a performance that set him on his way to a career where his enthusiasm and desire remains as strong now as it did then.
Less than five months out from the European Athletics Indoor Championships in Belgrade where he will be the defending triple jump champion, the Portuguese star is hungry for more success.
One of the reasons is that next month he will start being coached by one of the legends of track and field, the Cuban Ivan Pedroso, the 2000 Olympic long champion and nine-times world gold medallist, indoors and out.
'It's not every day that you have an idol as your coach,' said Evora, 32. 'I know many big jumps are coming. Let the show begin.'
Olympic triple jump champion in 2008 in Beijing, Evora was sixth in Rio this summer and is back on the path of a new Olympic cycle he hopes will take him all the way to Tokyo in 2020.
And as the European Athletics Indoor Championships in Prague in 2015 showed, a champion never loses his touch because seven years on from winning the Olympic title, Evora was crowned a European champion for the first time with a leap of 17.21m.
[VIDEO src='1280143' align='right']
It was a superb performance in that final, where his first two jumps were fouls.
Evora then drew on his wealth of experience to take the lead in round three with 16.98m before 17.15m in round five and 17.21m in round six.
And when he says the 'big jumps are coming', just how far will he go?
His indoor personal best is 17.33m from Karlsruhe in 2008 and his outdoor is his 17.74m national record when he won world gold in Osaka in 2007.
With Pedroso guiding him, the next chapter in Evora’s career could be very interesting indeed.
[VIDEO src='1280144' align='right']