The INIT Indoor meeting in this German venue will be followed by six other Gold meetings as the tour winds up for the World Athletics Indoor Championships in Belgrade from March 18 to 20.

Due to the twists and turns of the calendar because of COVID-19 cancellations and postponements, both the indoor and outdoor versions of the World Athletics Championships will take place in 2022, a year which also sees international track and field medals on offer at the European Championships in Munich and the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham.

At least Mondo Duplantis, the 22-year-old United States-based Olympic pole vault champion, will not need to factor in an appearance at the latter event, although, having chosen to represent Sweden, his mother's birthplace, there may be a call on him to compete in Munich.

In the meantime however the world record-holder is focusing on a year when he will seek to win two new global titles indoors and out.

Looking ahead to his first appearance of the season, Duplantis made it clear he had in mind improving the meeting record of 5.95 metres achieved by France's former world record-holder Renaud Lavillenie in 2021.

"If nobody has jumped six metres in Karlsruhe, then I feel like it's about that time," Duplantis said at the pre-event press conference.

The track being used in Karlsruhe is the one used for the 2013 European Indoor Championships in Gothenburg, where former world record-holder Lavillenie won with a 6.01m clearance and came tantalisingly close to recording 6.07m - only being denied because the bar, while still up, had been nudged from one of its pegs.

"I saw what Renaud was able to do on this track, making 6.01m quite easily and then having that funny attempt at 6.07m," said Duplantis.

"That was one of the main driving forces for me to come to this meet in general, because I saw that it's a place where you can jump high and I want to go to places where I can jump high and try to do something special and I feel like Karlsruhe is a place to do that."

Ethiopia’s Berihu Aregawi will be favourite in the men’s 3,000 metres following his world 5 kilometres record run on the roads of Barcelona on New Year’s Eve.

The 20-year-old ran 12min 49sec at the Cursa dels Nassos, taking two seconds off Ugandan Joshua Cheptegei's world record, after a track season in which he won the 5000m at the Diamond League final in Zurich and finished fourth in the 10,000m on his Olympic debut in Tokyo.

His Kenyan rivals include fellow 20-year-old Jacob Krop, who has an outdoor 3,000m best of 7:30.07, and Abel Kipsang.

The world champion is in action in the women’s 800m, where Uganda’s Halimah Nakaayi races indoors for the first time since setting her personal best of 2:01.96 in Lievin in 2020, while Elliot Giles, who surpassed Sebastian Coe's British indoor record last year, goes in the men's race.

The women’s 100m hurdles will involve two top Jamaican talents in 2015 world champion Danielle Williams and Tokyo 2020 bronze medallist Megan Tapper in a field that also includes Germany’s 2015 world silver medallist Cindy Roleder and European champion Elvira Herman of Belarus.

In the men’s 60m hurdles, Britain’s world indoor champion Andrew Pozzi will face world medallist and European outdoor champion Pascal Martinot-Lagarde of France.

Pozzi clocked 7.44sec - just 0.01 off his best - to win in Karlsruhe in 2017 and he went on to win the European indoor title later that season.

Germany’s Olympic and world long jump champion Malaika Mihambo will test her speed by racing the 60m.

With a personal best of 7.22, the athlete with a 7.30 metres long jump best ran 7.37 in Karlsruhe in 2020.

The women’s high jump no longer features the Authorised Neutral Athlete who last year added the Olympic to her world title, Mariya Lasitskene.

She has withdrawn with a cold, leaving Ukraine’s 2017 world silver medallist Yuliya Levchenko as the favourite.