At the European Athletics Indoor Championships in Prague in March, Germany’s Max Hess was the youngest man in the long jump, but age proved irrelevant as he finished 11th out of 24 in qualifying, just missing out on the final.
In Eskilstuna next month, he will be among the oldest - he turns 19 on 13 July, three days before the start of these European Athletics Junior Championships - and he should be leaving with a birthday present of a medal.
This German teenager impresses both in the long jump and the triple jump and 2015 has already been an important year for him.
He entered it with a long jump personal best of 7.52m but on 30 May in Weinheim, he increased that to 7.57m.
A day later he was competing in Forbach in the triple jump, the event that has brought him greater success in his career so far, where his leap of 16.08m put him second on the 2015 European Athletics Junior rankings led Azerbaijan’s Nazim Babyev with his outstanding 16.61m.
The competition between the pair of them will certainly be terrific in Eskilstuna.
But already in his short career Hess has shown how well he can adapt and deliver at major championships.
It can be a daunting task, learning what the big events are all about, but in Eugene last summer he produced his triple jump personal best of 16.55m to win silver at the IAAF World Junior Championships.
When he took to the long jump runway in Prague, he made an early impression as his first round long jump of 7.71m was the sixth best. With eight going through, Hess had immediately put the pressure on his more experienced rivals, including Greece’s Louis Tsatoumas, 33, the silver medallist from last summer’s European Athletics Championships in Zurich.
In the end Tsatoumas went from 7.62m to 7.90m in round two and Hess could not go further; he ended up missing out on the final by just eight centimetres.
But it was a performance which will provide enough encouragement, for whatever event he chooses in Sweden, to show his career is progressing in the right direction.