Carolina Klüft sounds almost too good to be true. Blonde, beautiful and bothered about world peace, she is the beauty queen of athletics. She is also beatable, according to Kelly Sotherton, one of two Britons trying to get the better of her for the first time in 18 competitions.

The Swede appears nonplussed by the attention that follows her around the globe. Inviolable for five years, the latest challenge to her heptathlon hegemony gets under way tomorrow morning. She is not scared by the prospect of losing and says that, if it must happen, she hopes that Sotherton is the beneficiary.

Sotherton, meanwhile, hinted that perhaps Klüft’s mask of invincibility is slipping as the World Championships begin in Osaka. “She’s always going to score well, but it’s four years since she set her personal best,” she said. “She’s had the odd injury problem, too. She is a great athlete, but I’m not sure she is actually getting better.”

As the world’s best, she may not need to, but the heptathlon is a rare chink of sunlight in the gloom surrounding British interest in Osaka. Sotherton was second to Klüft at the European Indoor Championships, trailing by a gossamer 17 points, and Jessica Ennis’s rise from “tadpole” billing to British No 1 promises much as she prepares for her first leading championships at the age of 21.

“I’m feeling good about all my events,” Ennis said. “If I can jump 1.95 metres again \, that would probably be the best and I know more is to come in the hurdles. I reckon it will take 6,600 points to pick up a medal. That’s a push for me, but there are events in which I can pick up extra points.”

Take the javelin. This has become a cause célèbre for Sotherton, whose foibles have wrecked previous events. Klüft’s best is more than 20 metres beyond Sotherton’s mark at last year’s European Championships, highlighting the problem. To limit the damage, Sotherton is now working with Mick McNeil, the former coach of Goldie Sayers, the British record-holder. “I’m actually beginning to go out and enjoy throwing,” she said. “It’s not as if I have never thrown decently.”

Nevertheless, Sotherton admitted that the javelin had become a millstone. “It has been traumatic at times,” she said. “But I have only got one event to improve on. I am upbeat about Osaka. There are 15 girls capable of taking a medal.”

The withdrawal of Eunice Barber removes one of them, but the opposition, chaired by Klüft, remains teak-tough. Ennis has no family with her in Japan because “they’re saving up to go to Beijing”, which probably sums up her development — well on track, but some way off her peak. “I hope for a personal best and, if it’s good enough for a medal, that would be amazing.”

The upside to the blanket pessimism of many observers is that expectations are sufficiently vertically challenged to raise the prospect of a surprise. Ennis or Sotherton could provide it on day one, when Mara Yamauchi, the Japanese-based Briton, also goes in the marathon, and Phillips Idowu lines up in the triple jump.

There was also encouraging news from the pre-event meeting in the Nagai Stadium where Christine Ohuruogu won a 400 metres in an impressive 50.56sec. The next week will put that into context as the world’s best strut their stuff on Osaka’s fast track, but it was a good run from an athlete on the way back from a 12-month ban for missing three drugs tests.

Ohuruogu’s problems, taking her case to the Court of Arbitration for Sport, left her £20,000 in debt and relying on the kindness of family and friends to continue. Her return to form — she has run quicker only once and that secured Commonwealth Games gold — came on the day that the IAAF Council stated its desire to impose four-year doping suspensions for “serious offences”.

For Britain’s new era, there is no time like the present to stake a claim for the future. “I don’t want to think about the pressure of having to win a medal,” Ennis said. Klüft, meanwhile, says that Sotherton definitely has a shout in Osaka and Beijing. British supporters will hope that her predictive powers prove as true as her more celebrated ones.