By Mark Butler BBC Sport's athletics statistician

Ennis and Dwain Chambers were winners at the World Indoors

In most years Jenny Meadows would be an easy choice as Britain's female indoor athlete of the year - but that honour must, in 2010, go to Jessica Ennis.

Meadows has a world silver medal and two splendid British records at 800m.

Yet with her performance in Doha, winning the pentathlon at the World Indoor Championships, Ennis has now joined an elite group of British athletes to have won two or more world championship gold medals.

She is the first British woman with world titles indoors and out, and only the third GB athlete to achieve that feat individually, after Colin Jackson and Phillips Idowu.

Now 114 Britons have won at least one International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) gold - the 114th being, of course, Dwain Chambers and his 60m gold in Doha.

By far the most successful British athlete in these terms is Paula Radcliffe, with seven golds at cross-country and road events during the period 1992-2005.

WORLD CHAMPIONS BY NATION Countries with most IAAF world athletics champions, 1973-2010 United States 315 Kenya 269 Ethiopia 156 Russia 142 Germany 137 Team GB 82 USSR 72 China 68 Cuba 58 Jamaica 52

Counting junior, youth and team events we have now had at least one world champion in all but four years since the first autonomous IAAF World Championships, starting with Scotland's Jim Brown, who won the junior race at the inaugural World Cross-Country Championships in 1973.

It was Britain's strength at cross country events which accounted for many of those golds in the early years.

In 2009 the team matched their record yearly total of six thanks to Ennis, Idowu and four golds by three athletes at the World Youth Championships. It may be that some of those 2009 World Youth champions go on to win World Junior gold later this summer.

Some 72 British men and 42 women have won a total of 158 world athletics gold medals since 1973.

This list includes scoring and non-scoring team members (in keeping with the IAAF's policy up to 2008), and relay runners who ran only in preliminaries.

Counting team wins as single medals, Britain's current total is 82 golds, an amount bettered by only five countries.

The United States head the list as they did in Doha, but surely the gap will close slightly after the forthcoming World Cross-Country Championships in Bydgoszcz, where it will be a shock if a country other than Kenya and Ethiopia takes top honours.

Including junior, youth and team events:

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