Bohdan Bondarenko, Ruslan Dmytrenko and Olha Saladukha will spearhead the Ukrainian team at this month's European Athletics Championships in Zurich.
The Ukrainian Athletics Federation announced in Kyiv their preliminary squad of 70 for the championships which start on August 12 and among the 34 men and 36 women, they are bristling with a series of top names.
Bondarenko, the high jump world champion, will have gold and the world record of 2.45m on his mind.
His success in 2013 led to him being named as the European Athletics Male Athlete of the Year and he has taken that form into this summer. He is top of the European Athletics rankings with his European record-equalling 2.42m from New York in June but it might become a private duel between Bondarenko and his Ukrainian teammate named alongside him in the event, Andriy Protsenko, who has jumped 2.40m this year.
Bondarenko is not the only Ukrainian man who is at the top of the rankings.
Dmytrenko has had a great year where he won the IAAF World Race Walking Cup in Taicang in May, with his time of 1:18:37 over the 20km being a national record. In Zurich, he will be the favourite for gold.
Saladukha is one of Ukraine’s greatest women athletes and she will be chasing a hat-trick of triple jump crowns at the European Athletics Championships.
She won in Barcelona with 14.81m and then reached 14.99m in Helsinki when she retained her title and since then has added Olympic and world bronze and European Indoor gold to her list of honours.
The squad is packed with major championship medallists, including one of the finest European athletes of all time - Sergiy Lebid.
Now 39, Lebid, the winner of nine SPAR European Cross Country Championships, will run in the 10,000m, having won silver in the 5000m at the European Athletics Championships in Munich in 2002.
Two years ago Helsinki, Oleksiy Kasyanov won silver in the decathlon behind Germany’s Pascal Behrenbruch. He returns in a team which includes Olympic javelin silver-medallist Oleksandr Pyatnytsya.
He missed out on gold by just seven centimetres in London, throwing 84.51m to finish second to Trinidad & Tobago’s Keshorn Walcott and has been close to a medal at the last two Europeans - with fourth in Barcelona and fifth in Helsinki.
Olha Zemlyak is having a fine season over 400m, sitting second on the European Athletics rankings with 51.10 from last month, and she will be another of Ukraine's big hopes for a medal, while 1500m runner Anna Mishchenko won bronze in Helsinki and is back seeking a podium place again.