Jessica Ennis: Unbelievable - From My Childhood Dreams to Winning Olympic Gold

by Jessica Ennis

  I did not feel that way but that night I slept well. I usually do. By the time you leave the stadium, having had a bit of physio and some food, it is late. I don’t talk to my parents in between, but I rang Andy and said, ‘Not a bad day, then.’ You just need a bit of reassurance, but I don’t read the papers or the Internet. I don’t want to see anything that might upset me or add to the pressure. So I am happy in my cocoon in my room.

  The next day I knew it was mine to lose. The main problem was the heat. It was scorching and the girls were all struggling to stay cool. I grabbed an ice pack and started massaging my legs. I did not know that simple act caused panic attacks back home in Sheffield where Mum was watching. ‘I thought you were injured,’ she would later tell me. ‘I was having a heart attack.’

  The long jump was good enough. I cleared 6.29 metres and, while that was far from great, I was happy in the circumstances. After the javelin, with only the 800 metres to go, I was 171 points clear of the field. Dobrynska was down in fourth and Chernova in ninth.

  I had an agonizing wait before the final event. I knew I had ten seconds to play with, but I was still worried. There was so much that could go wrong. At home I did not realize that my mum was getting just as wound up. My sister and dad were making such a lot of noise watching that it was getting on her nerves. So she went upstairs to watch on her own, in quiet if not exactly peace.

  I knew I had to get to the front. I did not want to get tripped by anyone. I did not want to get barged or spiked or boxed. The gold medal was hanging there, tantalizingly close but still a world away. Or at least two minutes in the distance. Chell told me what I needed to do.

  ‘Just run a steady pace,’ he said. ‘You’ve got a good cushion.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said.

  We lined up. Under floodlights the bright blue track shimmered. And then we were off. I ran the first lap in just over a minute. That is way too fast. It is the sort of pace the specialist 800 metres runners might go. All over the place, from Chell in the stand to Mum and Dad at home, people were wondering what I was doing. I had a ten-yard lead and then the lactic acid started to kick in and I felt the raw pain of the 800 metres. Chell tells me I fear the event more than I need to. It’s the reptilian side of my brain or something. Fight or flight. But I hated it then. The agony was intense but I knew I had only 300 metres to go. Then, coming off the last bend, Dobrynska overtook me and I thought, ‘I’m not having that.’ So I responded. Fight and flight. All those running sessions, all that hurt. I thought, ‘These few seconds are why you did all that. It’s so you can push harder than the rest. If you don’t push now, all those sessions are wasted.’ I came down the inside and won the race and the gold medal. The winning margin was 238 points. Jennifer Oeser was second. I collapsed on the track. It was over.

  I was handed a flag by a pair of twins who are mad followers of British athletics. I draped myself in it and began the lap of honour. Believe me, it took a massive effort to get round again. Maybe that is why we were slow, which meant we were all held up at the top of the home straight because they were just about to run the 100 metres final. So I sat down and watched Usain Bolt run the fastest 100 metres ever seen. If you are going to be delayed by anything, then I suppose that’s a pretty good reason. Anyway, it didn’t take long.

  We went into the mixed zone where you do the interviews with the TV, radio and press guys. Everybody was so pleased. I did my press conference and, as I came out of the room, Bolt walked in for his. He congratulated me and I did the same. Doc got a few pictures of us together. I have never seen them.

  At home my mum had run down the stairs and was now joining Dad and Carmel in screaming the place down. I rang them twenty minutes afterwards for a quick chat. Then I rang the next day too. They were watching highlights of me on the TV and so Carmel just picked the phone off the hook and put it back down again without speaking. I tried again. The same thing. And again. Eventually my mum answered.

  ‘Don’t you want to speak to me or something?’ I said.

  She said they had gone to the shop because they had not got any champagne in beforehand. ‘We got chicken and chips because we haven’t eaten for two days,’ Mum told me. In the corner shop my mum was trying to explain what had happened to Tony, the owner who has known me and Carmel since we were little. ‘It hadn’t sunk in,’ she explained.

  I went for a drink that night in an open-air bar outside the Olympic Stadium. Andy and his brothers were all there. It was late and there weren’t many people around, but I was still draped in the Union Jack. I tried to take it all in – the win, the comeback and the fact that my lap of honour had been interrupted. People asked if I was annoyed by that. Of course not.

  I did a lot of press afterwards. It was weird to think that nobody had been there to see me in places like Cleckheaton at the start of the year. Now people were asking me all sorts of questions, not all about sport. Some were about my looks. I found that embarrassing. I don’t look in the mirror and think, ‘Oh God yeah.’ I don’t think I’m anything special. Others speculated on how much money I would make, as if that was the most important thing.

  I was looking forward to seeing my parents and Myla, my new Labrador puppy. ‘I’ve no idea what it will be like,’ I said. ‘You’re in a cocoon here. Usually, I can go out for a drink at home unbothered. It’s only occasionally that someone gets a bit drunk and says, “Hey, you’re that heptathlon girl.” My parents say it’s gone mad, but I don’t know if I’m going to get a big welcome or just a couple of people clapping.’ It turned out that there were lots of people when they held a civic reception for me, a highlight of which was receiving a Mulberry handbag from Sheffield City Council. They are a particular weakness of mine and that was the first of many I now own.

  It got more surreal for us all after that. Journalists camped outside my mum and dad’s house, and kept putting messages through the door. Dad had to escape and so he went to his allotment.

  I got home and removed the champagne bottle that had stood on top of my fridge for a year. It had been given to me when I missed the Olympics, by Joe Rafferty, who worked for Adidas. I read the message written on it for the last time

  Open this when you are world champion in 2009

  and then I popped the cork.

  7

  REIGNING IN SPAIN

  Sport has a habit of giving with one hand and clobbering you with the other. I started 2010 in the form of my life but then felt a problem in my foot. I mentioned it to Chell.

  ‘I don’t mean to worry you but I’ve got a pain,’ I told him.

  His face dropped. Then he dropped everything else and we had it checked out straightaway. This time I went for an MRI scan in Leeds and found that there was a slight strain on the ligament that runs around the side of the foot. It was my right foot, what you might term the wrong foot.

  The doctor told me the bones were fine, but the frustration wasn’t. I had worked hard during the winter and felt I was in the form of my life. In various events, I had achieved eight personal bests in a month, as well as a British indoor record in the 60 metres hurdles. In that race I beat Lolo Jones, the almost untouchable world indoor hurdles champion, in Glasgow. It is always satisfying to beat the specialists. Combined eventers are sometimes referred to as jacks of all trades, so it is nice to go against specialists and show we can be competitive. I had attempted the British high jump record in Glasgow too and think that may have been where the problem started. The next day it felt a bit tight, but I went on to have a really good week of training and was running good times. The tightness lingered, though, and now that I had a history, I knew I should have it checked out.

  As a result I missed the trials for the World Indoor Championships and the Aviva Grand Prix event in Birmingham, but I did make it to the World Indoor Championships, which were held in March 2010 in Doha, Qatar – in the combined events, athletes are picked on form or past performances and so trials are never ‘sudden death’. I found it an odd place and, even though we w
ere indoors, the dry heat was awful. I was up against Hyleas Fountain, who had not been at the World Championships, and Dobrysnka was back in top form, so with another batch of training ruined by the foot problem, I had plenty of doubts going into the pentathlon.

  However, it could scarcely have gone any better. I ended up 86 points clear of Dobrynska, broke Carolina Klüft’s championship record and was four seconds short of breaking the eighteen-year-old world record of Irina Belova, which some say is tainted given that she failed a drug test the year after.

  I was ecstatic to have backed up my performance in Berlin, and I told reporters, ‘I’ve beaten them all now, here or in Berlin, and that’s the nicest thing – to come back this year and prove I’m not a one-hit wonder.’

  Chell likes to talk to the press and said people were making the ‘extraordinary ordinary’ by expecting a world record that ‘Klüft had several bashes at and didn’t achieve.’ He was defensive like that, but I was just relieved because I hadn’t done nearly as much as I had wanted to in training and had blown up in an 800 metres time-trial just before leaving.

  The only downside to Qatar was that I was so dehydrated that I spent five hours trying to give a sample in doping. The only other girl in there was a hurdler. She was there when I went in and there when I left. She might still be there now. Chell sat with me for a bit, then Jane came in. It was boring and frustrating because all I wanted to do was celebrate.

  It was around then that Charles van Commenee started saying he wanted me to move down to London. Lee Valley was going to be one of the national high performance centres and he felt that would be better for me to be based there. I could not understand that. I had won the world title and everything was working perfectly. Moving to London would have been the very worst thing for me. I had a nice home in Yorkshire but they wanted me to go and live in an athlete’s house, which would have been going back to university and living in halls. Charles said I would have everything I needed at the centre, but it wasn’t just about that. Andy had a job in Sheffield and my family and friends were all there. I like to have separation in my life and do things outside of sport. He didn’t get it. I don’t like conflict, but if it is something that I am passionate about then I will put my foot down and argue until the sun comes down.

  Eventually, he saw where I was coming from, but he still wanted me to move and tried to get Chell’s job based down there to force it.

  ‘I’m loyal to you,’ Chell said. ‘If you don’t want to go then we don’t.’

  We didn’t. I had never even competed in London and it would have been bad for me professionally and personally. I was world champion and I wanted to walk my dog with Hannah and have friends round for dinner. It was all so unnecessary.

  The performances remained good. In May 2010, I went back to Götzis, in Austria. I told the media that I was not bothered about what had happened there before, but of course I was. Everything reminded me of how my world had caved in two years earlier – the mountains, the physio room, the woman in heels in the town hall pointing out how small I was. However, I had no problems this time other than the black sky and thunderous rain. The top girls were there and Chernova really stuck at me, trimming my lead to 77 points going into the final event, but I responded and won the 800 metres.

  There had been a lot of talk of me breaking Denise Lewis’s British record beforehand. It had stood at 6831 points since 2000. ‘People talk about Denise’s record but you can’t think beyond one event,’ I told a group of journalists. ‘Get that wrong and it messes up the whole thing and that’s when it’s hard. You take a few minutes for self-pity, have a little cry and then try to put it into perspective.’

  When did I cry during a heptathlon, I was asked? ‘Osaka,’ I said immediately. ‘Close to tears, anyway. You work so hard to make everything right and then something goes wrong and you want to kick yourself and disappear.’ I thought about just how many tears I had shed, from Beijing to the boiler breaking down, and smiled.

  The issue of doping came up again. I said I could not understand why anyone would do it. The reporter suggested money, fame or jealousy? ‘But is it worth the risk of people thinking you’re a disgrace, let alone the health issues?’ I said. ‘Anyway, my family would kill me.’

  Then, with everything going smoothly, came another clobbering. The ankle problem I had at the start of the year was replaced by a major scare just before the European Championships in Barcelona. It started after a training session in Leeds. I felt a bit faint and just thought I was probably a bit dehydrated and so I sat down, drank something and felt okay to drive home. I trained the next day and thought nothing of it. I went home to get ready to go out for a friend’s birthday and then the whole room started to spin. It was frightening. I tried to stand up, but that made it worse, the room spun quicker and I felt sick. I couldn’t even move my head from one side to another. I wondered what was going on; I was panicking. I lay down on the bed and rang Andy.

  ‘Can you come home? There’s something’s wrong with me.’

  The EIS doctor, Richard Higgins, came out and said it was probably a virus that was affecting my inner ear. He prescribed some tablets and said that my balance would improve. Sure enough it did for a few days, but then I had another attack and it was back to square one. You start to imagine the worst in situations like that, especially after I went back to Google. I read about people who had the same thing and could never drive again. Before long I was wondering if my career was over again. The latest dizzy spell was far worse than the others. It was like being spun around endless times. I saw Richard Higgins and he said I should see an ear, nose and throat specialist. I went along and the specialist said there were two options. The first was to take a course of tablets for three weeks, with the side effects of feeling sick and having headaches, or I could try the Epley manoeuvre.

  I did not know what it was but I did know that it sounded vaguely painful.

  ‘It could clear it up within a day,’ he said.

  ‘Great.’

  ‘Or it could make it worse.’

  I often think that doctors hand out medication a bit too freely and so, having dragged Andy along with me to the specialist, I said I thought I should try the Epley manoeuvre. That was when the doctor got behind me, grasped my head and jerked it gently one way at 45 degrees. Then he did it the other way 90 degrees.

  A few days later I went for a brain scan. They are always anxious times as you wonder what on earth they might find in there. I hoped for the best and feared the worst. I began to worry that I might have a brain tumour. It took me back to the scan I’d had on my injured foot two years before. I remembered how everybody had told me it would be all right and there was nothing to worry about, only for the cold, hard facts of an X-ray to prove them all wrong. It was the same this time.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ everybody said. ‘It will be nothing.’

  This time they were right. I got the all-clear and felt a huge, unseen burden lift. I asked the consultant what could have been the cause.

  ‘There could be any number of reasons,’ he said.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Well, have you been under any stress lately?’

  Stressed! As an athlete you are always stressed. You win a competition but quickly look to the next one. The goalposts are constantly shifting. The pressure close to a major event is huge. Most of it is internal pressure you put on yourself to turn all the hard work into your best, but there was growing external pressure too, from the public, the sponsors and the media. I had made it look quite easy in Berlin and that was a curse really, because this was really very hard.

  So I might have been stressed without even knowing it. For years the American 400 metres runner, Sanya Richards-Ross, thought she was suffering from a condition called Behçet’s Disease that left her with mouth ulcers and skin lesions. It sounded horrible and was brought on by stress. Although she later said she had been misdiagnosed, there is no doubt stress can be a debilitating thing for an athlete, at
the same time as having positive benefits in some ways.

  I had missed three weeks and, when I was then made the team captain for the Europeans, my stress levels rose even higher. I am proud to represent Great Britain, but I am not a confident person. I felt it would be rude and ungrateful to turn down the offer, but the thought of having to give a team speech, as is the tradition, kept me up at night. Part of me thought that it would be good to put myself out of my comfort zone, but I didn’t enjoy the experience at all.

  A year on from Berlin and we were heading to another Olympic Stadium. The capacity had been reduced considerably since then and the football club that used to play there, Espanyol, had moved out. At some sessions there were big spaces on the terraces, but I still felt those same echoes of the past swirling around on the wind. Linford Christie was invited by Charles van Commenee to give us a speech. He actually read out a poem about his own experiences of winning the Olympic 100 metres gold in Barcelona back in 1992.

  I was far too young to remember any of that, but I was moved by his poem. It was short and quite funny. Then he read out another one, titled ‘Desiderata’, by the American poet Max Ehrmann. It ended with the lines: ‘With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams/It is still a beautiful world/Be cheerful/Strive to be happy . . .’

  I cannot say that I am a particular fan of poetry, but with Linford reading that out, in the vicinity of the Olympic Stadium, and with all of us preparing to compete, it touched a nerve. It also made me feel even more nervous when I had to give my speech. I don’t think it would win any prizes, but I spoke about my injuries and making the most of opportunities. Some people are naturally better at being captain. Dai Greene would lead the team in London and was great. Goldie Sayers was another good one, a lovely person who put individual notes under all our doors before one competition. For me, the role was a burden.