With ten medals won, including golds from Josh Kerr in the men’s 1500 metres and Katarina Johnson-Thompson in the heptathlon, Britain had enjoyed its most successful Championships since the 1993 edition in Stuttgart, when Linford Christie, Sally Gunnell and Colin Jackson won respectively in the men’s 100m, women’s 400m hurdles and the 110m hurdles.

France, with the Paris 2024 Olympics on the horizon, had won one medal - an unexpected silver in the men’s 4x100m relay. Awkward.

Things could have looked a little different had Kevin Mayer, France’s decathlon world record holder and double world champion, been fit. With Mayer it is usually feast or famine, and this time round it was the latter as his dodgy Achilles tendon gave out after two events - just as one of my French friends had gloomily predicted.

Maybe next year there will be one glorious finale for Mayer, who has won two Olympic silvers. It would be good to think so. But he will be 32 by the time the Games get underway next year and younger talents will be clamouring for a title he has never won.

The French Sports Minister Amélie Oudéa-Castéra has admitted results at the World Athletics Championships in Budapest were "not up to our ambitions", but said a meeting with French Athletics Federation (FFA) officials was "constructive".

Oudéa-Castéra added that France is now targeting up to six athletics medals at its home Olympics.

You never know. Not many people in Britain really expected that Jake Wightman would beat Norway’s Olympic champion Jakob Ingebrigtsen to the world 1500m title last year, or that Wightman’s fellow Edinburgh AC alumnus Josh Kerr would repeat the trick in identical fashion in Budapest.

Perhaps Alice Finot, fifth in the women’s 3,000m steeplechase, or maybe 800m runner Benjamin Robert, a bustling contender on his day although a disappointing performer in Budapest, can make France feel better next year.

Meanwhile Britons who did not make the Budapest team have been offering the domestic sport new reasons to be cheerful. On the track, notably, the son of former Leeds United, Manchester City and England full back Danny Mills - George Mills - has been making serious strides.

A late addition to the men’s 800m at the Zurich Diamond League meeting last month, the 24-year-old finished fourth in a personal best of 3min 30.95sec, and in yesterday’s Internationales Stadionfest meeting in Berlin he won with aplomb in 3:34.51.

Also on Sunday, in the Big Half staged on the roads of London, two more home talents emerged to earn their highest-profile victories so far in the form of Jack Rowe and Calli Thackery.

As a 40-year-old Sir Mo Farah, with six world and four Olympic golds to his name over 5,000 and 10,000 metres, ran his last professional race in London, finishing fourth, Rowe won in 1hour 1min 18sec to qualify for this event at next month’s inaugural World Road Running Championships in Riga.

Thackery also qualified for Riga in winning the women’s race in 1:09:15, and will run her first marathon in the United States on October 14 seeking the Olympic qualifying mark of 2:26:50.

Her victory came thirty years after one of the high points of her father Carl’s professional career in winning individual and team bronze at the World Half Marathon Championships in Brussels.

Can Thackery dip under the mark she needs in the McKirdy Micro Marathon, taking place at Rockland Lake State Park?

Let’s hope she has more luck than her dad did when he made his final attempt to qualify for the 1991 Tokyo World Championships 10,000m with a race set up for him in the mundane surrounds of the Northwood Stadium in the British Midlands city of Stoke.

Oh. Ah. It’s wavy screen time again…

Before his crucial race at the beginning of August which featured just six entrants, three of them Kenyans brought in to set the early pace, the whippety and hugely talented 28-year-old Yorkshireman had established a reputation for - well, it’s hard to find a word for it, but it was certainly not dullness.

In 1987 Thackery had set a UK best and world-leading time of 1:01:04 for the half marathon - a time which would have seen him come home 14 seconds clear in yesterday’s London race.

Perversely, he set it in his home county, at Barnsley - one of the hilliest courses in the country.

In 1990 he had set UK and Commonwealth records for both the 20km and the one hour of, respectively, 57:28.7sec and 20,855 metres in Le Mans, having decided to run at just a day’s notice.

There were times, however, when his fortunes were, well, outrageous.

In 1986 his preparations for the marathon at the Edinburgh Commonwealth Games were undermined by vertigo attacks, and he eventually failed to finish.

In 1987 he achieved the 10,000m qualifying time for that year’s World Championships with a personal best of 27:59.42. But that year the selectors decided that the third available 10,000m place should go to the Amateur Athletic Association trials winner Nick Rose, assuming he made the qualifying mark, or no one. Rose did not make the qualifying mark.

Thackery had emulated Rose by winning the 1991 10,000m trial - but the high wind in the Cardiff venue prevented him from achieving the qualifying time of 28:07.

He was fortunate to have been able to compete, to be fair. While training earlier in the year at altitude in Albuquerque in preparation for the London Marathon he had put himself out of action by running full tilt into a cactus on a mountain trail.

Teed up to seek a qualifying time in the Oslo Bislett Games taking place shortly after the 1991 trials, he was unable to compete because of a hamstring injury.

And so to Stoke-on-Trent…

The first drops of rain fell from an apparently cloudless sky five minutes before the race was due to start. By the time the six runners had lined up every other body in the Northwood Stadium - save for the hunched and cagouled track officials - had retreated to the back of the stand, caught in shorts and shirts by a downpour at the end of a long, sweltering afternoon.

I was among them, although I do believe I was in long trousers.

For Thackery it was raining slings and arrows. With a baleful look up, Kenya’s Lameck Aguta moved off on his fruitless mission.

The Yorkshireman had said beforehand that he felt his chances of getting the qualifier were 50-50. The odds were more like 20-80 by the start, and by the halfway point, which was passed in 14:08, he surely knew his task was hopeless.

By the time the last Kenyan dropped away with eight laps to go Thackery was effectively on a torrential training run, the third Tokyo place now effectively belonging to Andy Bristow, decorating tensely at his Marlow home with a qualifying time of 28:04 to his credit.

"The thing is," Thackery mused afterwards, "I know that in two or three weeks I will be in shape to run under 28 minutes. I’m just starting my speed endurance. What I really need is to stay injury-free. I need one good solid year."

He glanced up. "Just look at it now," he said.

The sky had emptied itself of rain and the sun was shining on the surrounding hills.