Jimmy Page is a parboiled rock God who once dabbled in the occult and took performance-inhibiting drugs, but it was widely accepted that he left the Olympic Games in ruder health than Great Britain's athletes. A muffled cameo appearance standing in a rockery atop a double-decker at the closing ceremony was deemed a better performance than many on the track. The Led Zeppelin guitarist went down a storm, Britain's best like a lead balloon.

The truth was different. While Beijing was no huge success, British athletics enters 2009 standing on the threshold of potentially its best World Championship season for 15 years. A shrewd, sharp-suited head coach, Charles van Commenee, takes office on February 1 and will demand a wimp-free zone.

The most successful showing at the World Junior Championships for eight years, led by the lip-smacking promise of Steph Twell, plus a record haul at the European Cross-Country Championships, bode well for the future, but there is real cause for optimism for the here and now. The World Championships in Berlin in August are the new target and Britain have sufficient talent to match the seven-medal haul from 1999. Indeed, if Paula Radcliffe stays fit then the clever money will be on Britain getting more than one gold for the first time since 1993 and only the fourth time in history.

Radcliffe remains the most luckless of world record-holders. While rogue revisionists knock her for failing on the Olympic stage, she has only been beaten in a marathon by injury and illness. If she makes the start-line in Berlin, only a myopic spendthrift would bet against her.

Christine Ohuruogu is Britain's other big player. The world and Olympic 400 metres champion will probably need to edge towards the sub 49-second mark to add to her haul as her rivalry with Sanya Richards, the American golden girl who went off like a hare in Beijing and folded, continues to smoulder. The apple-pie queen was forced to eat humble pie in China, but Richards will surely not be so reckless again.

The rehabilitation of Ohuruogu after her one-year ban gained royal approval when she was appointed MBE last week. She deserved it, as no other athlete peaks so perfectly and she admits that she has been driving herself to breaking point, even training on Christmas Day. Tellingly, Ohuruogu says that she loves running because she is in control of “my own failure”, not Richards, not the media and not the renewed threat of Nicola Sanders.

The 26-year-old Briton was one of the disappointments of Beijing, failing to make the final after knee, hamstring and quadricep injuries. “I'm not panicking, it was just a blip,” she said of the Olympics. It is easy to forget that Sanders was beaten by Ohuruogu by just four hundredths of a second at the last World Championships and she is serious enough about usurping her team-mate to forgo the defence of her European indoor title in Turin in March.

In the men's 400 metres, Martyn Rooney remains a precocious talent, despite being castigated for premature showboating in the relay. His best mark in Beijing would have landed him a silver medal had he produced it in the final and, while he ended up sixth, it was not bad for a 21-year-old who has spoken of stepping up to the 800 metres. Van Commenee will now expect more from Rooney and from his relay teams, who repaid heavy investment with a dose of Teflonitis when it mattered.

Metaphorical batons proved easier to pass in the 1,500 metres. Andy Baddeley says that he is no longer content merely to make important finals, while Lisa Dobriskey knows that she has what it takes to win a medal in an event shorn of Russian drug cheats. Her fourth place in Beijing was a source of both frustration and optimism.

Damning Hackney's finest triple jumper has become a hackneyed act in recent times and Phillips Idowu will be in the shake-up for gold again this year, as will Kelly Sotherton in the heptathlon.

The latter's prospects may be dented if, as she expects, Carolina Klüft decides to return to combined events, but the exile of Lyudmila Blonska, the two-times drug cheat, is a bonus for all.

Jessica Ennis will be back for the heptathlon from her broken ankle, although it would take an awful lot to rediscover her best form so soon after serious injury. Van Commenee's expertise in the heptathlon will be a bonus for the British duo, while his appointment of a globally renowned meetings director, Ian Stewart, as head of national endurance running, should help British athletes into high-class fields abroad.

All of which will soon be overshadowed by the return of Dwain Chambers. Whatever your moral stance on a former cheat running for Britain, Chambers should win gold at the European Indoor Championships if he is as good as last year and he is not forced to retire because of debts and doubters.

Should that happen, he could rightly argue that there is a certain irony in a cleaned-up drug offender representing Britain on a Beijing bus, while another is driven away from the track.

January 31: Aviva International, Glasgow. February 14-15: Aviva European trials and UK Championships, Sheffield. February 21: Aviva Grand Prix, Birmingham. March 6-8: European Indoor Championships, Turin, Italy. March 28: World Cross-Country Championships, Amman, Jordan. April 26: London Marathon. June 20-21: European Team Championships, Leiria, Portugal. July 3: Bislett Games, Oslo, Norway. July 10-12: World trials and UK Championships, Birmingham. July 24-25: London Grand Prix, Crystal Palace. August 15-23: World Championships, Berlin. August 28: Weltklasse, Zurich. September 12-13: World Athletics Final, Thessaloniki, Greece. October 4: Great North Run. November 1: New York City Marathon.