Germany’s mighty world javelin champion is headed for the opening International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) Diamond League meeting of the season on Friday (May 4), in, as always, in Doha.

He well recalls, as do all followers of athletics, that at last year’s Doha meeting his compatriot Thomas Rohler, the Rio 2016 javelin champion, began his season in the compact Qatar Sports Club stadium with a humongous effort of 93.90 metres – putting him second on the all-time list behind the event’s marvel of the ages, Jan Zelezny.

A year on, and it is Vetter arriving as a global champion to hurl his ambition at the new international athletics season - in a setting conducive to success.

"I know that the surface in Doha is quite good and last year we had really good conditions with a good back wind, so hopefully we’ll have the same again this year and we’ll see how far it goes," the 25-year-old from Dresden said earlier his week.

"The first meet of the season is always really special.

"You want to show how good you are and show the others that you are the man to beat."

Vetter responded to the inevitable question of whether he felt he could beat Zelezny’s 1996 world record of 98.48m with a sensibly measured response.

On July 11 last year, at the Spitnzenleichtathletik meeting in Lucerne, Vetter’s world went a little bit crazy as he produced four throws of more than 90 metres, the best of them, 94.44m, elevating him above his compatriot in the all-time pantheon.

The record of the Czech Republic’s triple Olympic and world champion is still remote. But Vetter, unquestionably, is excited about the prospect of closing on it. This season, he says, he is confident he can move into the territory beyond 95 metres…

Such is the unchanging currency of athletics, a sport where individuals sweat and work and dream of measurable - and sometimes immeasurable - achievement.

But if this core value will remain, much of its setting is now being re-evaluated as the International Federation, having, as its President Sebastian Coe says, "secured the house" with a series of cleansing reforms - most notably the creation of a properly independent body, the Athletics Integrity Unit, to manage the sport’s anti-doping programme - is now shifting its gaze to the product itself. The focus is, if not cruel, then certainly cold-eyed.

Doha has always been the starting point for the IAAF Diamond League since it was established in 2010 as the sport’s flagship circuit in succession to the IAAF Golden League, which had run since 1998.

The aim was to "enhance the worldwide appeal of athletics by going outside Europe for the first time". Accordingly, new stops were established in the United States, Qatar, China and - as of 2016 - Morocco.

I reported that first IAAF Diamond League meeting on an evening that began in stifling evening heat - it was 31 degree Celsius before the start, although the atmosphere ameliorated a little with evening coastal breezes blowing in through the skyscrapers of the Qatari capital’s exponential West Bay development.

Indeed, the following winds were too strong to allow Asafa Powell’s 100 metres clockings of 9.75sec in his heat, and 9.81 in the final, to be allowable for record purposes.

But there was no let or hindrance for Kenya’s up-and-coming 800 metres man, David Rudisha, as he held off his compatriot Asbel Kiprop, the world and Olympic champion, to win in a meeting record of 1min 43.00sec. What might the newcomer go on to do at the London 2012 Olympics...?

And so the Diamond League got underway. In the intervening years, the two traditionall heavyweight events in Zurich and Brussels, which share the finale of the Diamond League series, have maintained their standing. Eugene, Monaco and London have produced performances of consistently high quality. For others, performances have been more fitful.  

That said, such is the alchemy of the sport that some meetings have taken off following a couple of unlooked for or unexpected individual showings. You can never predict where excitement may flare.

The format of the IAAF Diamond League has been tweaked.

The original scoring system, used from 2010 to 2015, awarded points to the top three athletes at each meeting - four for first, two for second, one for third.

Each of the 32 disciplines - 16 each for male and female athletes - was staged a total of seven times during the season; points scored in the final meeting for that discipline - either Zürich or Brussels -were doubled.

The athletes who finished the season with the highest number of points in their discipline won the "Diamond Race".

Only athletes who competed in their discipline's final meeting were eligible to win the Diamond Race, but in many cases dominant performances earlier in the season ensured that athletes only neede to turn up match-fit for the final night to claim their prize.

In 2016 scoring was expanded to the top six.

A championship-style model was introduced last year which shifted the weight towards making the two finales into finals in the normal sense.

The top eight athletes at each meeting are now awarded points, but these only determine who reaches the discipline finals, where everything is up for grabs, and the winner takes both title and their share of the $3.2 million (£2.3 million/€2.6 million) prize fund in the form of cheque for £50,000 (£36,000/€41,000).

The championship format has worked well. But larger changes are now in the offing as the IAAF and Diamond League Board turn their gaze to the end of next year, when the current Diamond League contract comes to an end.

In a statement on the future direction of the circuit, the IAAF has said: "The goal is to create a future IAAF Diamond League which grows the fan base, fits into a comprehensive annual calendar, supports all meetings, and delivers a prosperous circuit, challenging the status quo of a one-day meeting format which has broadly remained unchanged since the early 1960s."

The IAAF can point to the fact that changes already made have proved effectve, with 282 million viewers from across 161 countries tuning in last year to see 805 athletes from 86 countries take part, with 39 countries producing winners during the 14-meeting series.

However, Coe has been striving over the last year to create a more fluid approach to the sport that will draw in new elements and ideas.

"Right across the sport there is a commitment to change,"  he said last November. "We need to give our athletes a compelling reason to compete and our fans a compelling reason to come back to our sport week in and week out.

"This is a revolution for us and it means facing up to the reality of how people - not just young people - are and want to consume our sport.

"Nothing is off the table. I have asked our teams to be open, creative and brave. We are in the entertainment business and we have to look at it in that way.

"Our sport is strong and we have had a phenomenal year of great performances and exceptional audiences [for World Championships events] in Uganda, The Bahamas, Kenya and across the Diamond League series, culminating in the amazing World Championships in London in August.

"But all sports are fighting for fans and thinking of new and different ways to present their sport or alter their core concepts and formats. We need to do the same."

Among the ideas conspicuously allowed to remain on the table, as far as Coe is concerned, are formats that have been developed in competitions in other sports, including cricket’s Indian Premier League, which has city-based franchises for the twenty20 competition. 

Pop-up running tracks for termporary use in football stadiums, and a wider exploration of the street athletics model are also in the thinking.

Meanwhile last year’s experiment of Nitro Athletics in Melbourne, featuring a strong and informal team feel, mixed events and a radical approach to distances and disciplines, has been noted approvingly by Coe – although it remains to be seen whether this approach will have a profound effect on the core offering of the sport in future years.

Deciding on the shape of that central core is a task that is currently front and centre in the IAAF thinking – albeit that the issue of athletes with difference of sexual development is currently clamouring for urgent attention, not to mention the impasse of relations with Russia following their doping-related ban...

At last November’s Leaders Sport Business Summit in London, Coe spoke about the objective of settling on a new structure for the Diamond League early this year.

"That is really important because we have to sell the broadcast rights, and the individual meet directors have to be able to sell their sponsorships around the new format," he said. 

"These are not easy decisions. It’s not about saying ‘well we have 14 races, maybe we only need eight’. It’s about the look of the events."

That timescale is now altered, and the new shape of things to come is unlikely to emerge until the end of this season.

Last week the Diamond League board met with its shareholders in London, presided over by Coe, who has been its chairman since 2015.

The Board is jointly composed of IAAF representatives and Diamond League meeting directors.

On the IAAF side along with Coe are Council member Anna Riccardi and Competitions Director Paul Hardy.

On the Diamond League side, the three representatives are currently Jean-Pierre Schoebel, general manager of the Monaco Diamond League meeting, Christoph Joho, joint meeting director of the Zurich Diamond League meeting, and Ellen Van Langen, the 1992 Olympic 800m champion and Shanghai Diamond League meeting director. 

Switzerland’s Patrick Magyar and Belgium’s Wilfried Meert, longtime directors of the Zurich and Brussels meetings respectively, have been key players in recent years.

It was, reportedly, a good and productive meeting, at which it was agreed that a working party would be set up to produce the criteria by which  Diamond League meetings can be judged in future.

"Obviously people are going to be fighting their particular corners, but there was more collaboration than there would appear," an IAAF spokesperson told insidethegames.

"The criteria are not yet set, but the idea is that each meet will have key information by the end of this season by which to judge themselves.

"This year we want to be giving everyone a kind of run-in so they know what the evaluation criteria will be.

"So they will be able to set their own meeting up against the criteria next year."

While Coe dismissed the idea that the new format would be as simple as reducing the core circuit to eight meetings, it would not be surprising if the total in 2020 is reduced to 12, or maybe 10 meetings - depending on whether the weaker meets on the current circuit manage to step up to the new markers of success.

Other cities may also come into, or back into, the top echelon - with Berlin, currently transforming itself inventively, both in terms of stadium and city centre options, for this summer’s European Athletics Championships, a highly promising contender.

The sport is working towards an end point, later this year, in which there will be broad agreement on the sport’s new shape.

Integral to that process will be two other recent IAAF reforms. The calendar will be seriously revised - no longer will the main conclusion of the season be followed by the end of IAAF Diamond League business.

Also in train, although not in operation, is the new world rankings system that now looks like coming into effect towards the end of this year - probably September or October.

The governing body signed a memorandum of understanding with Elite Ltd (All Athletics) to build, manage and maintain a new results and statistics database to support the system, which will help to decide the qualifiers for premier athletics competitions.

The vision is of future core events being linked to this system, making it essential for top athletes not to hop in and out of the circuit as they have in the past. Points will make prizes - and, crucially, spectators will be more confident of seeing the best athletes at what purport to be the best meetings.

"All these elements are in play and the idea is that they will all land at the same time later this year," the IAAF spokesperson added.

"All these elements will be inter-connected with the intention of making it more worthwhile for athletes to compete in key meetings, which will have the obvious additional advantage of making it worthwhile for people to watch them."

With the shape of things to come more clearly defined, the plan will then be to go to the market-place next year to re-negotiate television rights and seek an overall title sponsor - something the Diamond League has lacked since Samsung pulled out in 2012 following disputes over the vying claims of sponsorship tied to specific meetings.

However many meetings remain on the main circuit, it seems clear that the trend in recent years to outsource events such as the shot putt or discus to city centres rather than the meeting stadium will be enthusiastically developed.

With shorter, more television-friendly programmes being a key part of the sport’s future appeal there will be a need to streamline events. Making the most of disciplines currently parked early in a five hour session, sometimes well before the main crowd has arrived, makes sense from every point of view.

While the establishment of temporary tracks for city centre venues is economically vexed - especially as the show is free - the shifting of road races and some throwing events is demonstrably practical.

Last year’s IAAF Diamond League shot put final took place a day before the main meeting, at the Place de la Monnaie in the centre of Brussels. Snacks were provided. Drinks were served. The throwers, meanwhile, basked in the fleeting sunllight - and enduring limelight.

Darrell Hill of the United States hit the jackpot with a last round effort of 22.44m, a meeting record and more than half-a-metre over his personal best of 21.91m, to take the Diamond Trophy and accompanying $50,000 winner’s cheque.

This is the heartland. Between them, the IAAF and Diamond League are tending it.