RELUCTANT FAVOURITE KJT STILL RIDDLED BY SELF-DOUBT

IT SAYS something about her complex psychology that Katarina Johnson-Thompson arrived to a headliner’s billing in an Austrian mountain town yesterday and found it all rather strange. Or as she put it, she felt a little like an ‘impostor’.

After 15 months in which she won gold medals at the Commonwealth Games and the World and European Indoor championships, there was a jarring amount of self-doubt in that admission.

Those are the waves she has long surfed within her own mind and will continue to battle in this defining period of her career, with the Worlds in Doha this October and next year’s Tokyo Olympics. They fall in her peak years, when the 26-year-old — arguably Britain’s top athletics prospect in any discipline — would expect to deliver.

The outlook for those goals would seem to be extremely bright, evidence of which should come at the Hypomeeting this weekend in Gotzis, where most of the world’s best heptathletes have assembled for a competition that tends to identify who is in form before the biggies.

But while Johnson-Thompson is the favourite in the absence of Nafi Thiam, the world and Olympic champion, she is reluctant to embrace that status despite the glut of medals that followed the barren years of 2015 to 2017.

Johnson-Thompson (above) should be feeling close to invincible, and at the very least vindicated, after so many labels in the tricky periods. But in Austria she was either fighting urges to believe her hype, or genuinely unconvinced of her place.

The latter was most clearly hinted at in what she said about impostor syndrome, which is best characterised as doubting one’s accomplishments and fearing exposure as a fraud.

As she explained: ‘My mum sent me an article on it because when she was a dancer she felt the same. I don’t know what it will take not to feel like that — I’ll just know when it happens. ‘I know I’ve done good in the past couple of years and turned a corner, but I still want more from myself. I want to reach my potential. ‘People say stuff like I’m headlining and I’m coming here with No 1 status but I still don’t feel like that. I just feel I’ve got a job to do. I don’t feel like I’ve proved myself yet.’

That is probably a device for self-motivation. But, equally, confidence has been a tricky issue at certain junctures for her and searches for a solution to that and other technical cures have gone to all corners, including France, where she has trained for more than two years.

That switch has prompted her brilliant recent results, which carry the small caveat that each of the golds were won in events without Thiam. But what she has proven in the Belgian’s absence, and indeed in pushing her so close at the European outdoors in August, is that she is legitimately the second-best heptathlete in the world.

That is arguably a higher ranking than Dina Asher-Smith or Laura Muir have in their respective fields. A performance of 6,700 points in Austria would support that claim in the second half of this Olympic cycle.

In identifying the next couple of years as her time to shine, she said: ‘Jess (Ennis-Hill) was 26 when she won the Olympics. I feel I understand myself, my event, my body and the different techniques more now.’

Regarding techniques, her only weaknesses remain in the throws and it is notable that the new shot-put approach she adopted in France has been replaced with a former method.

For now, results suggest the tinkering is working. Evidently not enough to convince her she belongs, but enough to consistently win medals.