When the new concept of the European Athletics Team Championships first took place in 2009 in Leiria, Nelson Evora leaped 17.59m to win the triple jump for the host country.
The distance was just eight centimetres shorter than the jump 10 months earlier which had brought him gold at the Olympic Games and the result was the same as he beat Great Britain’s Phillips Idowu.
Six years on, the team championships is one of the leading competitions on the track and field calendar and though Portugal's Evora is now 31, the First League in Heraklion on June 20-21 could be about to witness the bridging of a remarkable gap.
It is because Evora will arrive as a major contender once again after his superb performance to win gold at the European Athletics Indoor Championships in Prague in March.
See Evora's final 17.21m winning jump in Prague below:
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The victory was a glorious return to the podium for a man who has had to battle back from two shinbone fractures and now he will head into the summer determined to show that age can never wither an athletics warrior.
On the island of Crete in a few weeks time, Evora will be looking to help Portugal back into the Super League. A year ago in Tallinn they finished eighth but if nothing else, his teammates can only but be inspired by the presence of this field eventer who talked in Prague of how much he can use that success into the next phase of his career.
Evora said: “It was a great preparation for outdoors with more opponents.”
Even now he wants to improve, an impressive trait for someone with his achievements. He spoke in Prague of his ‘idol’, Britain’s world record-holder Jonathan Edwards, and how he would like to learn from his technique.
So much of that was Edwards’ speed on the runway and fluency on take-off which brought him the untouchable mark of 18.29m in Gothenburg 1995.
Evora’s personal best goes back to 2007 when he won the world title in Osaka with 17.74m.
But as he has shown, in this second part of his enduring career, his hunger has not disappeared and this outdoor season, and the European Athletics Team Championships in particular, has wonderful possibilities of what might happen next.