Ennis Going for Barcelona Gold

In the space of a little over one year Jessica Ennis has changed. Not in the sense of her innate niceness which remains untarnished by fame and sporting success, nor in her girl-next-door, down-to-earth persona which comes from her Sheffield roots, but in her mind-set.

At the start of last summer she was an athlete full of unanswered questions and understandable doubts. Thirteen months on and she goes to the European Championships in Barcelona the week after next not only as the current world heptathlon and world indoor pentathlon champion, but as a sportswoman greedy for much more.

“I believe in myself,” she explains, as she sits in a stand at the Don Valley Stadium in Sheffield and gazes across the track. "I’m pretty greedy when it comes to titles and medals. I believe I can achieve it all.”

Last year Ennis made her first tentative steps towards a comeback after a promising career – a bronze in the 2006 Commonwealths, a 4th in the 2007 world championships – was halted in its tracks by three stress fractures in her right foot that ended her dream of going for a medal at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. “I cried and cried until I couldn’t physically cry any more,” she recalls.

Then, on her return to action after a 12-month lay-off, she won a multi-events competition in Italy and came to the Berlin world championships ranked number one in the world, a position she justified by taking gold.

For good measure she backed this up by becoming the world indoor champion in Doha last March, proving that the 24-year-old is far from satisfied with her lot. On reflection the terrible injury that shattered her dreams may just have been the making of her.

“I was devastated at the time but in the back of my mind I always thought there must be a reason for it. On my return last summer in Italy I was very anxious because I genuinely feared I’d never be the same athlete again.

“I’ve never really admitted this before but, deep down, I really fancied my chances in Beijing. I’d finished fourth the year before in the worlds but had made great strides since then and had enjoyed a really good indoor season. I felt as if I was flying.

“Then I had it all taken away from me. To win in Italy and to have such confidence to go to Berlin and become world champion means that I feel as if I can deal with anything now, and that, in hindsight, the injury was the best thing to have happened to me.

“It forced me to rest and to re-evaluate myself, and it made me so, so hungry to grab every opportunity I could in my sport. That’s why on the podium in Berlin, within seconds of celebrating my world title and hearing the national anthem, I was thinking about the world indoors, then the Europeans and, ultimately, the London Olympics. I now realise I won’t be happy until I’ve won them all.”

It is a far cry from the 10-year-old who came to this very stadium in 1996 for a two-week summer “Startrack” camp run by Norwich Union who now, 14 years’ on, will be organising similar camps under their new name of Aviva. “I’d never done any athletics in my life, nor wanted to,” she recalls. “I wanted to be a chef or, believe it or not, a journalist. But a coach spotted me, I started to train and, because I’m an indecisive person, I went for the heptathlon.” The rest, as they say …

Ennis has just arrived in Portugal for the British team’s holding camp in final preparations for the Europeans, and she insists that by Friday, the 30th, when day one of the heptathlon begins in the historic Montjuic Stadium, she will be more than ready despite a recent inner ear infection that affected her balance so badly she could not train or compete for a fortnight.

“I could have done without it,” she says. “But I don’t think any harm’s been done. I’ve just got to fine-tune a few things and I’ll be good and ready, especially as the heptathlon starts at the end of the week.”

Despite it being the Europeans, which are supposed to be of less importance than the worlds or Olympics, she finds herself up against all her main rivals save for America’s Hyleas Fountain. Ennis knows what this means.

“Oh, I’ll have to go better than I did at the worlds last year,” she accepts, matter-of-factly. “If I do I should score 100 points more than my best score and that would mean taking Denise Lewis’s British record of 6,831 points, which would be nice. Getting to the top was hard work, but I already know that staying there is much harder. Everyone will want to knock me off my perch.”

For a second she sounds like the Jessica of old, especially when she adds: “I still get very anxious in competition about what the others could do, and I still find it surreal that I’m world champion. A part of me believes I’m still chasing others when, in reality, I’m the one being chased.”

That’s what the likes of the Ukrainian 2008 Olympic champion, Natalia Dobrynska, and Russia’s Tatiana Chernova, who came third in Beijing, will be doing in Barcelona. They were beaten by the British athlete in Gotsis in Austria only last month, so they know Ennis remains hungry. The thought of Gotsis returns Ennis to the new-look Jessica.

“The good thing about Gotsis was that it means we all go to Barcelona with me having beaten them all,” she explains. “So we’ve had Desenzano, Berlin, Doha and now Gotsis and they haven’t beaten me in any of them. That’s good for me.
“People ask me if it is too much pressure to be the favourite these days but I always think it’s a nice position to be in. I’ve got the titles, I know what it takes now to win a major title or two, and it seems that I’m the one to beat.”

Jessica Ennis fixes you with a smile that melts most athletics observers, and then contradicts it with a statement that should worry anyone planning to stop her striking gold in Spain. “I wouldn’t want it any other way.”

 
Jessica Ennis is an ambassador for Aviva, the No 1 sponsor of the GB & NI team since 1999. Find out how Aviva is helping Jessica and her fellow athletes at www.aviva.co.uk/athletics