World and European champion led overnight with a score of 4,097 points – a commanding 300 points ahead of her nearest rival, Canada’s Commonwealth Games silver medallist Jessica Zelinka, with Ukrainian Olympic champion Nataliya Dobrynska a further 72 points adrift down in eighth place.
Significantly, Ennis also ended the day 17 points ahead of her opening-day score at last summer’s European Championships in Barcelona, where she finished just eight points short of Lewis’s 11-year-old mark of 6,831 points.
“I’m really happy but I just want to get some rest and get a good day in tomorrow,” she said. “I’m not getting carried away. I wasn’t sure where I was at and what kind of score I was after and to have done a personal best in the 200, I’m really, really happy.”
Ennis’s form is all the more remarkable given the ankle injury she suffered in March which prevented her from running and jumping properly for eight weeks. She only returned to full training six weeks ago and had been unsure whether she would be ready to compete in Gotzis.
In second place, Jessica Zelinka, the Canadian who took silver at the Commonwealth Games last year, looked a long way off the Briton, while the defending Olympic champion, Nataliya Dobrynska, struggled all day long, finishing in seventh place.
If it was a gamble for Ennis to compete and risk her unbeaten run, and world No1 status, it certainly looks to be paying off. While this heptathlon came sooner in the year than she and her coach would have liked following her injury, it is testimony to the talent of this extraordinary athlete that her first comeback in the discipline was so impressive.
Not that every event has gone perfectly for Ennis: an average win of 13.03 in the 100m hurdles – one of her favoured events – and a disappointing performance in the shot put, in which she threw 13.94m, were less than she would have hoped for. But a strong comeback in the high jump was a boost.
"I was worrying I would go out at 1.85m so it was a big jump to do 1.91m," Ennis said. "I was really annoyed with myself in the hurdles. It was perfect conditions and everything was in my favour but I had a shocking start and was hitting hurdles. It was messy and didn't really come together.
Far be it for Ennis or Minichiello to be thinking negatively. Realism and hard work are what have got the former King Ecgbert and Sheffield University student to the pinnacle of her sport.
And those principles aren’t about to be forgotten now.
Taking part in individual events, as she did on the streets of Manchester or the Loughborough track, recently are all well and good. But the heptathlon is when she’s officially ‘at work’.
“I still get nervous before every event,” she said. “It does feel different doing heptathlons though, because that is what I do.
“Before hand I’m not really looking forward to it, but once I get the first event out of the way I enjoy it.”
Ennis enjoys winning as much as she hates the 800 metres, which is the seventh and final discipline of a heptathlon.
Whether she finishes the two-lap slog with that famous smile on her face tomorrow is open to debate.
Just know that there is a bigger picture to her career that we’ll all be witness to in 434 days. Only then will she accept that she’s truly our golden girl.
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