Two days later, at the conclusion of the 200m semi-finals, it was evident that the longer sprint would not be as competitive. In equaling her personal best 21.66 to beat her main medal rivals with ease, Thompson-Herah’s performance made it clear that retaining her Olympic 200m crown was a near-certainty. The only question remained how much faster she could go in the final.

The answer came the following day in a scintillating 21.53, to win gold in the second-fastest time in history. A few weeks later at the Eugene Diamond League, she replicated that achievement over 100m, clocking 10.54 to move second on the all-time list.

Over the space of those few weeks, Thompson-Herah’s feats left the athletics world salivating at the prospect that the impossible might in fact be possible. For many, Griffith Joyner’s 100m and 200m world records have sullied global sprinting for decades. Rarely, if ever, are they mentioned without an asterisk or caveat of some sort. How did a woman who was absent from elite athletics for an entire year return noticeably leaner, more muscular and significantly quicker, lowering her 10.96 100m personal best to 10.49 and 21.96 200m personal best to 21.34 in the space of a few months?

Griffith Joyner claimed her improvement was down to a new training regime and improved diet, never failing a drugs test despite multiple unsubstantiated reports from fellow athletes and coaches that she had taken performance-enhancing drugs. She retired after winning triple gold at the 1988 Olympics and died suddenly after an epileptic seizure in 1998, but her world records have endured.

For more than 30 years, those marks have stood far out of reach of even the best female sprinters, with the prospect of anyone getting near them deemed fanciful. That now appears no longer the case. Thompson-Herah’s Tokyo achievement already puts her in rarified company. Just two other women have won back-to-back Olympic 100m titles in almost a century of competition, while she was the first woman since Griffith Joyner in 1988 to achieve the 100/200m Olympic double.

Thompson-Herah says she believes she is capable of breaking the 100m world record in the coming years, although Griffith Joyner’s 200m mark remains frustratingly distant. With four individual Olympic gold medals already to her name, it would be fitting if Thompson-Herah could add two letters before her career is done: WR.