It is the second leg of the IAAF Diamond League in Shanghai on Sunday and for Renaud Lavillenie, a return to the competition where he has become a dominant force.
Frenchman Lavillenie is the only man to have won his event each year since the League started in 2010 but this time he will take to the stage knowing one question is likely to be asked of him all summer: will he break the pole vault’s world record outdoors?
It is a natural request from his inquisitors because of his sensational winter where, in Donetsk in February, he cleared 6.16m to overtake the indoor mark of 6.15m that Ukraine’s Sergey Bubka had held since 1993.
Bubka achieved 6.14m ourdoors in 1994 but Lavillenie, whose personal best is 6.02m from the Olympic Games in London, insists that more history-making is not even on his mind.
'I have nothing to prove to anyone,' said Lavillenie in an interview with AFP. 'I always quest to go a little higher. My goal this year is to beat my personal best outdoors, so to jump between 6.05m and 6.10m.'
Above everything else he is looking to return to the major competitions, particularly because his winter was cut short - including missing the World Indoor Championships in Sopot - after he cut his foot in Donetsk when he fell badly trying to take the record higher.
He faces a top field in Shanghai, with the entry list including Raphael Holzdeppe, the German who beat him to brilliantly win gold at the World Championships in Moscow last summer, and World indoor champion Konstantinos Filippidis of Greece.
But the message for now is not to expect any fireworks as Lavillenie said: 'I'll be satisfied if I win with 5.80m.'
Three weeks ago he jumped 5.70m at the Drake Relays in Des Moines and added that to 'do better than what I did there in the United States would make me happy.”
Moscow saw German shot putter David Storl retain his World title as his 21.73m beat American Ryan Whiting by six centimetres and the pair will go head to head again in Shanghai, though it will not be about just these two.
While Storl will be the defending champion at the European Athletics Championships in Zurich in August, his biggest competition should come from Poland’s Tomasz Majewski, the Olympic champion, who is here in China, in an event which includes Bulgarian record holder Georgi Ivanov.