Glowing in the aftermath of a second heptathlon world title, Katarina Johnson-Thompson briefly allowed her mind to shift to next year's Olympic Games.
She had said prior to these World Athletics Championships that Budapest was something of a warm-up act to those Games, but as for what Paris might bring, she said: "Who knows? You can't predict the future."
Her quote would have been an apt precursor to these championships. Her body had been rebuilt after the Achilles rupture prior to the last Olympics and the calf injury that ruled her out during day one of the Games themselves.
Her coach, Aston Moore, admitted the mental rebuild had been as hard as all the physical grind after last year's Worlds, where she finished eighth and feared that was the best she now had to offer.
With a gold medal around her neck, Johnson-Thompson was quick to credit Moore and her other coaches for constantly giving her the belief "when I've questioned myself, even this weekend".
Over two days of competition, she showed the grit to hang in there when, at times, it looked like everything was all falling apart. The high jump bar nearly came down on her third attempt at 1.80m on day one and on her championship charge as a whole.
The 200m, which had marked her Olympics end in Japan, proved her supercharge, giving her the belief she could go on to win gold.
She topped the field in the long jump yesterday and threw a personal best in the javelin — an event that has so often had proved her downfall — to set up a thrilling, energy-sapping duel over 800m with Anna Hall.
The American shot into the lead, needing to beat her British rival by some three seconds, but Johnson-Thompson went on to shatter her own personal best by two seconds. The calm, which she had spoken of prior to Budapest, was there to see on the startline, aided by a montage showing her coming down the home straight in Doha to win her first world title in 2019. "I saw [the image of] myself, saw the flicker in my eye and that just really calmed me," she said. "That was the calmest I've been the whole weekend and that's just the easiest thing I've ever done. I was in pure robot mode."
It was a gold she said that comfortably eclipsed that of Doha, despite being way short of her points tally in the desert. Having finally cast aside the doubts from Eugene 12 months ago, she hailed it "the best day of my life".
A holiday is in the offing and a brief hiatus from training before the build-up to Paris begins.
The heptathlon there has the ability to be one of the stand-out events. Hall, who was hampered by a knee niggle after a long-jump take-off gone wrong in her build-up, will no doubt be back to full fitness, so too the previous world champion Nafi Thiam, absent in Hungary. As for Johnson-Thompson, for whom the Olympics has been the one to elude her, she said: "I'm going to build and build and build. I'm going to carry this momentum into next year."
Her medal was the start of a second strong night for Team GB. Following a silver on day one in the mixed 4x400m relay, Zharnel Hughes added a bronze in the 100m. Hughes, the fastest man in the world this year going into the event, briefly thought he had won gold, which went to Noah Lyles and missed out on silver by one thousandth of a second.
