A highlight, however,was the return of high jumper Robbie Grabarz, one of just two other athletics medallists for the host country at London 2012 along with Christine Ohuruogu, second-placed finisher over 400 metres.

After years as an aspiring jumper of little note on the fringes of elite level, Grabarz enjoyed remarkable improvement in the 2012 season, performing with remarkable consistency throughout the year. He claimed the gold medal at the European Championships in Helsinki and a British record equalling 2.37 metres in Lausanne - which propelled him towards the overall Diamond League crown - before bronze on home soil in the Olympics

He seemed destined to go from strength to strength in the years ahead, bullishly targeting Rio 2016 gold in his post-competition interview. But instead he appeared to go completely off the radar as Ukraine’s Bohdan Bondarenko and Qatar’s Mutaz Essa Barshim, with whom Grabarz had shared third place in London, cleared 2.40m plus heights for fun.

The 28-year-old bombed in qualifying at the 2014 World Indoors and the 2015 World Championships and at the beginning of this season appeared in danger of losing his British number one spot to up and coming team-mate Chris Baker. Then he returned in style, clearing 2.33m in Portland to beat Barshim, who finished fourth, and third-placed US Olympic silver medallist Erik Kynard. He ended-up second behind Gianmarco Tamberi, an Italian best known for his distinctive and quite peculiar “half a beard” facial hair.

It was only in reading his quotes afterwards that I realised what Grabarz has been through over the last four years.

He went for surgery on his take-off knee in 2014 and discovered the damage was far worse than initially thought. “I had two bursas removed, I had tendons scraped, my bone shaved, some cartilage removed,” he said. “My surgery was set to take 45 minutes to an hour and I was in there for over that, so it was a bit more damage than they were expecting.”

On his return, he struggled unsuccessfully to clear 1.80m, the “height a 16-year-old girl jumps”, and could only manage 2.11m in his opening competition of last season.

“If someone said I’d get that result two years ago, I wouldn’t have believed it,” he admitted afterwards. “I would have bitten their hand off. The reward feels much greater just to have got to that place on your own and with the team behind me that have got me back to where I am, help with physio, help in the gym, help from my coach, all those things to make such a huge difference and I’ve given them the best result I can.

"These days looked very far away and that just made me train harder. When I really didn’t want to get out of bed those days made me get there and then to get the reward here of being able to compete with these guys and get a medal makes it just great.”

I find it hard to get awestruck when athletes talk about the “sacrifice and dedication” they have shown to reach the top of their sport. Their life of training, recovery, travelling and competition seems fairly exciting and, in many ways, more straightforward than the 50-hour a week plus office jobs most other people their age do.

One area in which we can really sympathise is injuries. I remember tweaking a muscle the week before a half-marathon race I had spent the summer preparing for, and being hopping mad - quite literally - that all the training had been in vain. For professionals whose whole career is based around competing at the top level, the frustration must be 100 times greater.

It must be boring, as much as anything else, to sit at home not being able to compete or, arguably even worse, being reduced to arduous recovery techniques like aqua-jogging, which don’t supplement the real thing. And then finding the motivation to stay confident and keep training despite missing out on what could potentially be the best years of your career.

A good example of a particularly frustrating injury is one suffered by England and Arsenal footballer, Danny Welbeck, who initially was struck down by what appeared to be nothing more than a minor bone bruising on his knee last April. His time out stretched from a few days to a few weeks and then months as rumours mounted that his whole career was in jeopardy. Happily, Welbeck returned to action in February, but his famously injury-hit team-mate Jack Wilshere remains out with a leg fracture and is now in danger of missing an entire season.

"Sometimes it's been difficult to stay positive, especially after the injuries that I've had, which have been frustrating,” he said.

“Jack Wheelchair,” chirp less sympathetic opposition fans.

There are many other athletes who have suffered more injuries than most. Marathon runner Paula Radcliffe, for instance, was derailed by leg and stomach problems when she entered Athens 2004 so far ahead of everyone else on paper she seemed all she needed to do to win the Olympic gold medal was turn up. As we know, sport does not work like that and she dropped out in agony after 22 miles.

She returned to win the gold medal at the following year’s World Championships but suffered setback after setback thereafter, competing at Beijing 2008 while injured before failing to make the start-line at London 2012. She limped on before officially bowing out following last year’s London Marathon.

At least Radcliffe achieved great things in her career, and she is still the women’s world record holder over the 26.2 mile distance with a scarcely comprehensible 2 hours 15min 25sec set in 2003 - more than three minutes quicker than any other woman has run. 

Numerous others are forced to retire young with promise unfulfilled as their bodies give up on them. I trained, or attempted to train, with one such individual at university in middle distance runner Jennifer Walsh. She was, to put it simply, the hardest working athlete I had ever come across, running a ridiculous number of miles at a pace rarely below six minutes for each one - even on a warm-up “jog”.

She finished eighth over 1500m at the 2012 World Junior Championships in Barcelona, and was ranked Britain’s second under-20 behind future Commonwealth Games finalist Jessica Judd, and ahead of another Olympic-bound athlete in Laura Muir, fifth at last year’s World Championships. Then Walsh got a stress fracture of her femur during warm-weather training, was out injured for a year, and was never able to reach the same level again.

Others do manage to make it back to the top. Another British middle-distance runner, Kelly Holmes, battled season after season of injury before it finally all came together in 2004, when she peaked in Athens to claim an Olympic double over 800m and 1500m.

Rugby union legend Dan Carter was forced to miss most of the 2011 World Cup won at home by his New Zealand team after tearing a groin tendon.

He suffered one injury after another over the next four years before holding his battered body together one last time to score 19 points as the All Blacks beat Australia 34-17 to successfully defend their title at Twickenham, a haul which included a magnificent game-changing drop goal with 10 minutes remaining. “It's a fairytale finish and I just count myself so lucky,” he said.

For Robbie Grabarz, a World Indoor Championships silver medal was just a first step towards his ultimate goal of Rio 2016 gold. He can take solace from the fact he, unlike many, has been able to return from years on the physio's bench to somewhere near his best.

Surely one of the hardest mental or physical challenges in sport.