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JessIca Ennis-Hill W o n d e r W o m a n...episode after episode of Smallville – the story of Clark Kent’s development from provincial teen to global icon. “It definitely kept

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Page 1: JessIca Ennis-Hill W o n d e r W o m a n...episode after episode of Smallville – the story of Clark Kent’s development from provincial teen to global icon. “It definitely kept
Page 2: JessIca Ennis-Hill W o n d e r W o m a n...episode after episode of Smallville – the story of Clark Kent’s development from provincial teen to global icon. “It definitely kept

W o n d e r W o m a n

16 | July 26 2013 |

JessIca Ennis-Hill

A year on from her

London heroics,

Jessica Ennis-Hill

returns with a new

name, new goals,

and even a cape

uperman might seem an unlikely saviour for an Olympic champion, but he helped Jessica Ennis-Hill recover from her lowest ebb. With her foot in a cast after the career-threatening stress fracture to her right ankle that wrecked her

2008 season, the heptathlete watched episode after episode of Smallville – the story of Clark Kent’s development from provincial teen to global icon. “It definitely kept my mind off being miserable and upset about being injured,” she tells us in an exclusive interview one year on from the London 2012 Olympic Games.

“I don’t think I’m much like Clark Kent,” says Ennis-Hill, laughing when we ask whether she sees any similarities between the girl from the Steel City and the Man of Steel – beyond the red and blue Lycra, of course. It’s not quite a school bus full of kids, but she did bear unprecedented pressure on her shoulders as the unofficial

face of London 2012. A heroic performance in the heptathlon saw her set three personal bests and surge across the line first in the 800m to add the polish to the now renowned Super Saturday – a perfect performance from start to finish.

But, behind the scenes, it wasn’t nearly as smooth as it looked. “I was really nervous the whole year,” she reveals. “Obviously when you do interviews you have to keep a strong face, but the beginning of the year didn’t go the way I wanted it to, and I had a lot of trouble with the long jump that I had to keep really positive with. I kept saying that it was all fine, but I had terrible sessions – right up until the holding camp before we went into London.”

It’s certainly strange to hear her admit to the unseen worries playing on her mind, given her mask of composure. “Lots of little things crept into my mind,” she admits, with the honesty that made her one of the most compelling stories of the Games. k

P H o T o G r a P H Y : J o H n d a V I S

W o n d e r W o m a n

Page 3: JessIca Ennis-Hill W o n d e r W o m a n...episode after episode of Smallville – the story of Clark Kent’s development from provincial teen to global icon. “It definitely kept

Jessica Ennis-Hill

| July 26 2013 | 19Download the free Sport iPad app from the Apple Newsstand

“I went to one of my first Diamond League events in the hurdles, false-started and got disqualified. So I was thinking: ‘Oh gosh, what if I do that in London?’ It’s never a smooth ride; there are all these different things going on behind the scenes, and things are playing on your mind.”

As well as the pressure she put on herself, there was, of course, that immense national expectation. Her face looked down from billboards and buses across the country – in her book she talks about not being able to indulge in a visit to her local chippy because of her own face judging her from a poster. At times, she says, it was all too much.

“If I’d had a bad session, it would get on top of me, and I’d come home worrying that everything was kind of falling apart,” she reflects. “People just expected me to win no matter what, and I really knew how hard it was going to be. I’m not gonna lie – it did worry me quite a bit.”

You can almost sense the relief washing over her in one of the iconic images of the Games. The photo of Ennis-Hill crossing the line in that 800m will surely be made into a statue some day: eyes closed, head tilted back, arms raised in celebration. However, she admits that celebrating in that manner was “totally out of character”. She sounds genuinely horrified when we ask whether she regrets not opting for a more outlandish victory move, or a more marketable shape such as the ‘Bolt’ or the cringeworthy ‘Mobot’.

“I would never do that,” she insists. ”Putting my arms in the air was pretty out there for me, so I’m not about to do any dances! I’m quite a reserved person anyway, so normally I just get on with competing. Inside I’m either really nervous, or happy or angry, but on top you can’t tell. With the Olympics, it just completely took over me. It was the greatest thing I ever wanted to achieve and I’d done it. It was relief that came out of me more than anything.”

T h e r e T u r n If everything up to and including that famous celebration marked part one of Ennis-Hill’s career – the origin story, if you will – then

the sequel hasn’t gone quite as well as she would have liked, at least on the track. A nagging ankle injury is casting doubt on her participation in this weekend’s Anniversary Games, staged in London to mark a year since the Opening Ceremony. There’s no heptathlon, so if fit Ennis-Hill will be taking on the world’s best hurdlers and long-jumpers.

A greater concern is the World Athletics Championships in Moscow, which start in a fortnight’s time. As things stand, the 27-year-old will go into them after a long break from competition. With that in mind, she has already admitting to having to come to terms with the fact that this year “will not be like previous years”.

She can’t wait, however, to get her feet back in the blocks. “I’m looking forward to kind of blowing off the cobwebs and getting back into it,” she tells us. But she does admit to having some nerves: “My last real big competition was obviously the Olympics, so I have a tough act to follow...”

One of her main rivals, Tatyana Chernova, will be competing in front of a home crowd in Moscow – a “complete reversal”, says Ennis-Hill, of the situation in London, where the Russian took bronze. Chernova did pip

Issue 268 | August 10 2012

How my Olympic dream came true

Jess Ennis

Ennis-Hill to gold at the worlds in 2011, however, and will be one of the favourites – particularly with the Brit’s training so badly disrupted. “I’d love to go to the World Championships and come back with the gold medal, but I’m very aware it’s going to be tough,” she says. “Chernova will definitely be looking forward to competing there, and I’m sure she’ll want to win gold at home.”

It was always going to be tough returning to the grind of training after the Olympic high. It was down to earth with a bump back in September, at her first “horrendous” post-Games session under the supervision of long-time coach Toni Minichiello, but Ennis-Hill allowed herself to bask in the victory glow until the turn of the year. “You’re still excited by what you’ve achieved,” she says. “But as soon as it turns 2013, you have to put that to one side and refocus.”

With her Olympic medal back in its box, it took Ennis-Hill some time to build up her motivation again after the Games.

“It’s definitely harder at the start, because you start on a huge high and have to get back into normality and do all the work,” she adds. “But as the months went on and the new year came round, that’s when I kind of got my motivation back and got into it.”

A n e w h o p eThe big occasion has always been the real motivator for Ennis-Hill. She would never admit it, but there was a hint of playing to the crowd about the way she forced her way to the front in the 800m, despite a win not being required to secure gold. “I love competing in front of a big crowd and having that adrenaline of everyone there watching,” is as far as she will go on that front. “I did a lot of hard running sessions for the 800m; I was always killing myself on the track, so in the competition I felt I had to give it everything.”

We ask whether Ennis-Hill thinks she will find it difficult going from the cauldron of the Olympic Stadium to Diamond League events in places such as Estonia and Finland.

“London was the highlight of my career,” she says. “It’s going to be hard to top, so I just have to take each competition at a time and see what I can do.”

Whatever she can or can’t do in Moscow and beyond, Ennis-Hill will look back on 2013 with almost as much fondness as 2012. Because, after a long engagement that straddled the Games, she finally wed her fiancé Andy in May – hence the new moniker. Her husband is a construction site manager, and she says being married to someone outside athletics helps take her mind off the pressures she faces: “We do talk about athletics at home sometimes, but it’s nice because we have something else to talk about. It helps not to get too stressed and wrapped up in the sporting world, and it helps me try and put things into perspective – so it’s definitely a good thing for me.”

Outside of that fortress of solitude, Ennis-Hill hasn’t quite had to adopt a secret alter-ego, but she admits she has to work k

“ i ’ m e i T h e r n e r v o u s ,

o r h A p p y o r A n g r y ,

b u T y o u c A n ’ T T e l l ”

Ennis-Hill graces Sport’s

cover from August 10

last year, after crowning

her heptathlon gold

by winning the 800m

Page 4: JessIca Ennis-Hill W o n d e r W o m a n...episode after episode of Smallville – the story of Clark Kent’s development from provincial teen to global icon. “It definitely kept

Jessica Ennis-Hill

20 | July 26 2013 | Download the free Sport iPad app from the Apple Newsstand

Cre

dit

hard to keep her private and public personas separate amidst the maelstrom of photo shoots and television adverts.

“I’m still a very private person,” she insists, before breaking out into her infectious laugh when Sport asks her to elaborate. “I don’t go out in a disguise! But I’ve always got a hoody that I can wear when I’m taking the dog out for a walk or things like that, so I can kind of keep quiet and get on with my day. Things take so long when people want to come and speak to you all the time. You know, you might be in a rush getting to training, and people want pictures. But, of course, it’s all lovely.”

What of her interactions with a still well-wishing public? “It’s definitely different now,” she says. “People recognise you more now and want to wish you good luck. It’s still strange when people come up to me and start screaming, but it’s lovely that people admire what you do. I get lots of strange letters. There’s one guy who sends figurines – he makes little cut-out wooden figures of me on a little stand that he’s hand-painted and he sends me those...”

She enjoys fierce local support from her hometown of Sheffield – bewilderingly, Sheffield United have even named one of their stands after her. She feels that the city has offered her an environment that has helped her achieve success, and was adamant in her refusal to move to the metropolis of London when asked to so by the then head of UK Athletics, Charles van Commenee.

“I think where you’re from and how you’ve been brought up and the people around you are a huge part of who you are,” she says. “It’s a friendly city and people are very down to earth. They support what you’re doing, but they don’t kind of blow smoke up your arse. They just let you get on with it.”

T h e q u e s T f o r p e a c eThe city’s Don Valley Stadium is where it all started for a “scrawny” 11-year-old Ennis, but it is soon to be demolished to cut council costs. “It’s really disappointing that it’s going to be knocked down,” she says. “That’s where I started – and it’s been a big part of why I’ve been able to be successful. Having such a big stadium in my home city has been inspiring, and it’s such a shame that all the kids in the city aren’t going to have that.”

She laughs when we suggest that if they build a new track it will almost certainly be named after her, but the serious tone soon returns. “I jut hope we can find funding to put money into developing one of the other tracks in Sheffield, so there is still a base for myself and other athletes,” she says. “I think we need that in our city.”

Despite the closure of her former training base, Ennis-Hill says she does see some signs that the Olympics have done as promised and ‘inspired a generation’.

“When I’m training at the English Institute for Sport, there are absolutely loads of kids down there, and I do see a lot of enthusiasm for athletics locally. I think it’s gonna perhaps

take a little bit longer to see the true legacy, but where I train there are people excited about athletics and wanting to get into it.”

Ennis-Hill refuses to be drawn into specifics on her own future: “It’s so hard. You don’t know what’s going to happen from session to session or year to year, or how your body or motivation levels hold up. Rio is definitely a goal for me; that’s a long-term thing that I’m working towards. I don’t know... I’ll be 30 in Rio and probably on the downward spiral of my career, so I’m not thinking after that point just yet.”

Ennis-Hill’s hurdles time in London would have won her gold in the individual event in Beijing, and she’s considering giving up the

“ n o w p e o p l e

w i l l e x p e c T

m e T o k e e p

w i n n i n g f o r

a l o n g T i m e ”

physically demanding heptathlon to focus solely on hurdles in future. “I really love the hurdles,” she says. “There are likely to be a few more competitive hurdle races, so I can see how I measure up against the other girls.”

Whatever she decides to do, Ennis-Hill says she’s sure there will always be pressure. “People will expect me to keep winning for a long time, but if I achieve nothing else I would still be the happiest girl in the world with what I achieved last year and the few years before,” she smiles. “In that respect, it’s a nice position to be in. I’m still in the middle of my career and hopefully I can achieve more.”

Although she jokingly answers “kryptonite” when we ask what her weakness is, finally buying into our tortured superhero analogy, it’s hard to see a reason why Ennis-Hill shouldn’t keep achieving in the long term. In London, she proved beyond doubt that she can cope with that pressure and handle the unique expectation placed upon her.

She might not be saving the world, but one year on the quiet girl from Sheffield turned heroine of the Games returns, ready to take it on again.

Amit Katwala @amitkatwala

Jessica Ennis is Vitality Ambassador for PruHealth

and PruProtect, helping to motivate people to live a

healthy lifestyle and rewarding them for doing so.

www.pruhealth.co.uk, www.pruprotect.co.uk