Jessica Ennis was born in Sheffield in In the school holidays Jessica attended local athletics camps, and at the age of thirteen Jessica had her first coaching session with Toni Minichiello. After graduating with a degree in Psychology from the University of Sheffield, Jessica became a professional athlete; her greatest achievement to date has been winning heptathlon gold at the London Olympic Games.
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The Hairy Dieters: Good Eating. Engineering in the Ancient World. I turned them into learning experiences and moved on. Focusing on goals and achievements in sports is great, but when you take that into your personal life, it can be.
Subscription Notification. We have noticed that there is an issue with your subscription billing details. Please update your billing details here. When Ennis-Hill won the Olympic gold medal in London her focus was purely on herself.
This time around she wants to retain her title for her two-year-old son, Reggie , who will be watching back home in Sheffield. I would love my performances to be great out in Rio, to show him what his mum achieved just two years after he was born. All three are such supremely talented athletes that the mental battle could make all the difference. It just meant so much. Minichiello's own out-of-character celebration came after the penultimate event - the javelin.
The anxiety this time dated back 12 months to the World Championships in South Korea. Despite outperforming Tatyana Chernova in five of the seven events in Daegu, Ennis-Hill managed a throw of just That metre gap ruined any chance of winning gold although Ennis-Hill was later upgraded from silver when Chernova failed a drugs test. Minichiello said in interviews at the time that her javelin capitulation had left him "stunned".
London witnessed a stunning turnaround. Ennis-Hill outperformed Chernova - throwing That previous year's painful metre gap became a joyous second cushion over her nearest rival, Lithuania's Austra Skujyte, before the final event, the m in the heptathlon, points are converted into seconds for the m.
That was the point where we kind of knew that I would have to do something pretty terrible to mess it up going into the m. If the attitude on day one from Ennis-Hill's support team was one of restraint, now, with the gold medal all but hers, they couldn't be contained.
I knew I hadn't but it was just a really strange environment. Even Toni was upbeat and positive. With a near seven-hour break between the conclusion of the javelin and the m, all but one of her fellow competitors headed back to their apartments in the Olympic village.
Having spent years religiously keeping away from the stadium, now she couldn't bear to leave. And so, before the gold medal moment that cemented her place in the limelight forever, Ennis-Hill wiled away the afternoon in a windowless room in the bowels of the Olympic stadium, watching dressage on mute.
She was bugging me asking me what lead she had and how many seconds it was. As she knew perfectly, the margin [13 seconds] was massive. The only threat to her gold-medal coronation was injury. A danger she understood only too well. Four years previously Ennis-Hill had been preparing to make her Olympic debut at the Beijing Games in Having finished fourth at the World Championships in Japan she would have headed back to the Far East as a medal contender.
A stress fracture in her foot meant she missed out. In the BBC footage of the call room before the m, two things stand out. First is the size difference between the giant Chernova and the diminutive Ennis-Hill. The second is how calm Ennis-Hill appears. In reality, she was anything but. That feeling will never leave me. It was the best - but worst - feeling ever. Some athletes were being quite intense, slapping their legs and psyching themselves up. Others were just sat in the corner.
With everyone though there was that common feeling of just nervousness, and fatigue, because at that stage you are exhausted from two days of competition.
You just want it to be over. Two minutes, eight seconds later it was. Ennis-Hill led the race early before appearing to run out of steam. The gold medal was never in danger, but she desperately wanted her crowning moment.
Twelve months earlier, the back pages of the national newspapers all featured the same image of her defeat at the World Championships. The imposing Chernova crossing the line arms aloft, with Ennis-Hill a few metres behind, diminutive, deflated and defeated.
No doubt Steve Cram would be pulling his hair out in terms of my m running from a tactical perspective. In the last m I just felt like I had been through that pain before so many times in training. This was my one opportunity to have that moment across the line.
I had to do it. Ennis-Hill found the second wind she needed. Coming into the home straight it was clear that her career-defining moment was going to reach the perfect climax.
By its nature the heptathlon - combining seven events over two days - often doesn't finish with the overall victor crossing the line first.
In London, the stars aligned and Ennis-Hill did just that. In the immediate aftermath of her victory, the pictures show her carrying a Union Jack with the words "Jessica Ennis, Olympic champion" on it.
Her soft tissue therapist coach Derry Suter had had it pre-made. Such an act of presumptuousness didn't sit right with Ennis-Hill or Minichiello. Their reactions though, typically, contrast. Ennis-Hill first: "When he gave it to me, I was like, 'Derry, you have had that made up'. If I knew he was doing that behind the scenes I would have been like, 'no, no, you're jinxing me'. Minichiello: "I'd have burnt it if I'd known. Suter's act can be seen as a metaphor for the attitude of the nation at large.
Ennis-Hill stayed away from the Olympic Stadium in the years building up to but she couldn't stay out of the public consciousness. The 'face of the Games' headlines, the 'golden girl' captions, the giant painting of her on the flight path of planes coming into Heathrow - they all combined to create a singular expectation. There is a reason for this.
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