Jessica Ennis Story
Ever wonder why you never get a feel good story from China, the past East Germany, USSR , the Eastern European Countries etc. This is despite so many Olympics.
London 2012 Olympics: How Jessica Ennis became the face of the Olympics
The first time Jessica Ennis did something astonishing on the track she was only 10 years old.
By Cole Moreton
8:45PM BST 04 Aug 2012
“It was one of those jaw-dropping moments,” said Mick Thompson, recalling the day he first saw the young Jessica run in the summer of 1996.
“Her technique was absolutely perfect and she looked so fast and fluid over the hurdles. You see some good kids but she was really very good.”
Mr Thompson was running taster sessions at a summer athletics camp for children in the Don Valley Stadium in Sheffield. Jessica and her younger sister Carmel had only gone along for the sake of something to do in the school holidays.
“We joke about it now as cheap child care,” said her mother Alison Powell, who is a manager in Sheffield for the charity Turning Point, working against drug and drink addictions.
“Jess absolutely took to it like a duck takes to water. Jess wanted to do everything. Jess wanted to win everything. Carmel wanted to sit in the background and chat and just have a laugh with her friends.”
After that Jessica started going along to the City of Sheffield Athletics Club. Her first proper coach was a genial, wise-cracking Yorkshireman with Neapolitan roots, called Toni Minichiello.
“At that age you really don’t know what these kids are going to be good at,” he said.
“My philosophy is to keep them doing lots of different things and see which area they are best in. But as Jess got older it was obvious that she was good at them all.”
All these years later, he still oversees her training — although now at the head of “Team Jennis”.
This group includes a physio and a soft tissue specialist, a javelin coach, a biomechanist who films her in training and competition and suggests improvements to the way she moves, and the head of physiology for the English Institute of Sport in Sheffield.
Much of their work is done on the same Don Valley track where she started out, as well as in the gym.
Ennis still lives in the city where she was born in 1986. Her parents live nearby. She shares a semi-detached home in the suburbs with her boyfriend Andy Hill, a construction manager, and her chocolate Labrador Mila. But she trains six days a week.
“We’ve been working together now for 14 years,” said her coach last year, “and it’s a bit like a father-daughter type thing. She finds me slightly embarrassing, like a dad at a wedding who’s dancing badly.” Still, they got results from the very beginning.
Ennis won the national schools high jump title at the age of 14, but also chose to compete in the heptathlon. This combines the high and long jump with the shot put and javelin, the 100m hurdles and running races over 200m and 800m.
She hated the last of the seven events, saying: “It seems like an unnecessary amount of pain to put your body through.”
But while other young competitors dropped out over the years, Ennis just kept going and going.
Her parents had to make a decision. Would they allow their daughter to devote long hours to training and lose their weekends to competitions?
Would they nurse her when she got injured and wipe her tears when she felt the pain of losing, all in the distant hope of glory? Or would they say enough was enough, and insist she had a broader life than just athletics?
“Lots of people used to tell me how much natural ability she had. I was a bit cautious,” said her mother.
“I’d got nothing to compare it with. I wasn’t sure whether they were telling the truth or not and I wanted to be protective of Jessica, to make sure people weren’t building her hopes up too much.”
Neither of them was sporty. Alison liked the long jump as a child, and Jessica’s father Vinnie Ennis had been a bit of a sprinter after coming to this country from Jamaica at the age of 13, but neither of them took it further than school. Mr Ennis later worked as a painter and decorator.
Carmel wasn’t interested in sport and is now a nursery nurse. But both parents and her sister backed Jessica all the way, however single minded she became.
“I did worry at one point that she was quite selfish,” said her mother, “and it’s only as time has gone on that I’ve realised that’s what’s made her successful.”
This ability to focus on what she needed to do helped her get three A-levels at the King Ecgbert School in Dore then a 2:2 in psychology at the University of Sheffield.
It was allied to a passion for organising things: Ennis has described herself as “a control freak” when it comes to packing her bags and relaxes between contests by finalising the details of her wedding to Andy. It was put off until next year, so as not to distract her from the Olympics.
This was her second attempt to get there. The first ended in tears just before Beijing in 2008 when she was forced to withdraw because of a triple fracture that threatened to end her career.
The family lost thousands of pounds on hotel rooms and flights as a result. They also had to deal with her struggle to cope with the disappointment and a 12-month break from competition.
“She kept saying, 'I’m 21, this could be the end of my career. I haven’t achieved what I want to achieve,’” said her mother. “She was so upset and it made me cry.”
But Ennis was tough and she recovered to win the world championships the following year — followed by the world indoor title in 2010.
People warmed to her pluck and skill as well as her beauty, which was cleverly marketed. It was now that a strange alchemy of public affection, media attention and the desire of big corporations to be associated with a gorgeous young winner began to identify her as the future Face of the Games in 2012.
For two years running she came third in the BBC Sports Personality of the Year competition and in 2011 she was given an MBE.
Like Lewis Hamilton in Formula 1, she had the look the sponsors wanted in a country where increasing numbers of us have parents with different racial backgrounds. Research has shown that the face the majority of people of all ages find most attractive is symmetrical, flawless and mixed race.
Olay loved hers, and used it to sell moisturiser. Jaguar praised her speed and grace and supplied a black five-litre car. Omega took care of her time-keeping needs. Powerade, BP and Aviva put their money behind her. Adidas gave her a deal said to be the most lucrative of any Team GB athletics competitor, at £320,000.
Going into the Games her sponsorship from eight corporations was thought to add up to a million pounds, while experts predicted she could triple that with a gold medal.
She vamped it up in sexy outfits for men’s magazines, but was still able to come over as friendly and genuine for the women. Only one poster fazed her — the one put up near her local chip shop.
“I was about to go in, but then I saw it and changed my mind,” she said. “Me coming out with a bag of chips, while I’m up there doing crunches on the poster - well, it would not look good.” Ennis made no secret of liking a bit of cake before a contest, nor of keeping a bag of Haribo sweets with the banana in her kit bag to provide an energy rush when it was needed.
But it seemed absurd when her coach complained in May that someone high up in British athletics had suggested Ennis was carrying too much weight. She was actually magnificently fit, in every modern sense of the word.
Ennis joked that when she Googled her name the first thing she found was people talking about her backside. But she wasn’t going to spend the months leading up to the Games hiding away on a mountainside somewhere.
Instead Ennis went to visit the set of Coronation Street and appeared on the comedy quiz show A League of Their Own. Despite it all, once again she kept her focus — and smashed the British record for points scored in a heptathlon only months before the Games.
By the time London 2012 began she was already a wealthy woman and a superstar in this country. British Airways decided it was time to tell the world — or more specifically all the athletes and visitors coming in to land at Heathrow. A
n image of her in red, white and blue kit 173ft high was painted on to a field in Hounslow with the words: “Welcome to our turf.”
The Canadian heptathlete Jessica Zelinka joked on arrival in this country: “Kinda feel like I’m living in a Jessica Ennis theme park.”
Even inside the Olympic village, there was no escaping her fame. On Thursday the British team leader Dai Greene tweeted: “Fulfilling my captain duties today, at the warm-up track. A foreign athlete asked me to take a picture of her with Jessica Ennis.”
He was left staring into the middle distance at the start of a team press conference that same morning, as the questions all went to Ennis. She gave very little away but spoke well, with a nod and smile at the end of every answer. Not for the first time, David Beckham came to mind.
Nevertheless, one of her fellow competitors had identified the pressure she was under.
The sailor Ben Ainslie said: “Look at Jessica Ennis. I feel really sorry for her because she’s put up there on a pedestal and is expected to be the star of the Olympics and win a gold medal. But nobody really knows how difficult it is.”
To some extent that extra pressure had been created by Team Jennis and the desire to market her. Could she live up to all that love the nation had shown her?
Alison Powell said: “Whatever happens I know that Jess will come out all right. She has a realistic attitude. She wouldn’t be happy if she didn’t win, but she would get over it.”
When the time came, both parents were there by the side of the track in the Olympic stadium side by side, with a union flag. They watched their daughter take her marks for her first event. the 100 metre hurdles, frowning with intense concentration.
The starting pistol sounded — and then she flew over the hurdles, just as she had done as a child all those years ago. Jaws dropped again.
This wasn’t just fast, it was the fastest anyone had ever run in Britain. There were only six more contests to go...
Ever wonder why you never get a feel good story from China, the past East Germany, USSR , the Eastern European Countries etc. This is despite so many Olympics.
London 2012 Olympics: How Jessica Ennis became the face of the Olympics
The first time Jessica Ennis did something astonishing on the track she was only 10 years old.
By Cole Moreton
8:45PM BST 04 Aug 2012
“It was one of those jaw-dropping moments,” said Mick Thompson, recalling the day he first saw the young Jessica run in the summer of 1996.
“Her technique was absolutely perfect and she looked so fast and fluid over the hurdles. You see some good kids but she was really very good.”
Mr Thompson was running taster sessions at a summer athletics camp for children in the Don Valley Stadium in Sheffield. Jessica and her younger sister Carmel had only gone along for the sake of something to do in the school holidays.
“We joke about it now as cheap child care,” said her mother Alison Powell, who is a manager in Sheffield for the charity Turning Point, working against drug and drink addictions.
“Jess absolutely took to it like a duck takes to water. Jess wanted to do everything. Jess wanted to win everything. Carmel wanted to sit in the background and chat and just have a laugh with her friends.”
After that Jessica started going along to the City of Sheffield Athletics Club. Her first proper coach was a genial, wise-cracking Yorkshireman with Neapolitan roots, called Toni Minichiello.
“At that age you really don’t know what these kids are going to be good at,” he said.
“My philosophy is to keep them doing lots of different things and see which area they are best in. But as Jess got older it was obvious that she was good at them all.”
All these years later, he still oversees her training — although now at the head of “Team Jennis”.
This group includes a physio and a soft tissue specialist, a javelin coach, a biomechanist who films her in training and competition and suggests improvements to the way she moves, and the head of physiology for the English Institute of Sport in Sheffield.
Much of their work is done on the same Don Valley track where she started out, as well as in the gym.
Ennis still lives in the city where she was born in 1986. Her parents live nearby. She shares a semi-detached home in the suburbs with her boyfriend Andy Hill, a construction manager, and her chocolate Labrador Mila. But she trains six days a week.
“We’ve been working together now for 14 years,” said her coach last year, “and it’s a bit like a father-daughter type thing. She finds me slightly embarrassing, like a dad at a wedding who’s dancing badly.” Still, they got results from the very beginning.
Ennis won the national schools high jump title at the age of 14, but also chose to compete in the heptathlon. This combines the high and long jump with the shot put and javelin, the 100m hurdles and running races over 200m and 800m.
She hated the last of the seven events, saying: “It seems like an unnecessary amount of pain to put your body through.”
But while other young competitors dropped out over the years, Ennis just kept going and going.
Her parents had to make a decision. Would they allow their daughter to devote long hours to training and lose their weekends to competitions?
Would they nurse her when she got injured and wipe her tears when she felt the pain of losing, all in the distant hope of glory? Or would they say enough was enough, and insist she had a broader life than just athletics?
“Lots of people used to tell me how much natural ability she had. I was a bit cautious,” said her mother.
“I’d got nothing to compare it with. I wasn’t sure whether they were telling the truth or not and I wanted to be protective of Jessica, to make sure people weren’t building her hopes up too much.”
Neither of them was sporty. Alison liked the long jump as a child, and Jessica’s father Vinnie Ennis had been a bit of a sprinter after coming to this country from Jamaica at the age of 13, but neither of them took it further than school. Mr Ennis later worked as a painter and decorator.
Carmel wasn’t interested in sport and is now a nursery nurse. But both parents and her sister backed Jessica all the way, however single minded she became.
“I did worry at one point that she was quite selfish,” said her mother, “and it’s only as time has gone on that I’ve realised that’s what’s made her successful.”
This ability to focus on what she needed to do helped her get three A-levels at the King Ecgbert School in Dore then a 2:2 in psychology at the University of Sheffield.
It was allied to a passion for organising things: Ennis has described herself as “a control freak” when it comes to packing her bags and relaxes between contests by finalising the details of her wedding to Andy. It was put off until next year, so as not to distract her from the Olympics.
This was her second attempt to get there. The first ended in tears just before Beijing in 2008 when she was forced to withdraw because of a triple fracture that threatened to end her career.
The family lost thousands of pounds on hotel rooms and flights as a result. They also had to deal with her struggle to cope with the disappointment and a 12-month break from competition.
“She kept saying, 'I’m 21, this could be the end of my career. I haven’t achieved what I want to achieve,’” said her mother. “She was so upset and it made me cry.”
But Ennis was tough and she recovered to win the world championships the following year — followed by the world indoor title in 2010.
People warmed to her pluck and skill as well as her beauty, which was cleverly marketed. It was now that a strange alchemy of public affection, media attention and the desire of big corporations to be associated with a gorgeous young winner began to identify her as the future Face of the Games in 2012.
For two years running she came third in the BBC Sports Personality of the Year competition and in 2011 she was given an MBE.
Like Lewis Hamilton in Formula 1, she had the look the sponsors wanted in a country where increasing numbers of us have parents with different racial backgrounds. Research has shown that the face the majority of people of all ages find most attractive is symmetrical, flawless and mixed race.
Olay loved hers, and used it to sell moisturiser. Jaguar praised her speed and grace and supplied a black five-litre car. Omega took care of her time-keeping needs. Powerade, BP and Aviva put their money behind her. Adidas gave her a deal said to be the most lucrative of any Team GB athletics competitor, at £320,000.
Going into the Games her sponsorship from eight corporations was thought to add up to a million pounds, while experts predicted she could triple that with a gold medal.
She vamped it up in sexy outfits for men’s magazines, but was still able to come over as friendly and genuine for the women. Only one poster fazed her — the one put up near her local chip shop.
“I was about to go in, but then I saw it and changed my mind,” she said. “Me coming out with a bag of chips, while I’m up there doing crunches on the poster - well, it would not look good.” Ennis made no secret of liking a bit of cake before a contest, nor of keeping a bag of Haribo sweets with the banana in her kit bag to provide an energy rush when it was needed.
But it seemed absurd when her coach complained in May that someone high up in British athletics had suggested Ennis was carrying too much weight. She was actually magnificently fit, in every modern sense of the word.
Ennis joked that when she Googled her name the first thing she found was people talking about her backside. But she wasn’t going to spend the months leading up to the Games hiding away on a mountainside somewhere.
Instead Ennis went to visit the set of Coronation Street and appeared on the comedy quiz show A League of Their Own. Despite it all, once again she kept her focus — and smashed the British record for points scored in a heptathlon only months before the Games.
By the time London 2012 began she was already a wealthy woman and a superstar in this country. British Airways decided it was time to tell the world — or more specifically all the athletes and visitors coming in to land at Heathrow. A
n image of her in red, white and blue kit 173ft high was painted on to a field in Hounslow with the words: “Welcome to our turf.”
The Canadian heptathlete Jessica Zelinka joked on arrival in this country: “Kinda feel like I’m living in a Jessica Ennis theme park.”
Even inside the Olympic village, there was no escaping her fame. On Thursday the British team leader Dai Greene tweeted: “Fulfilling my captain duties today, at the warm-up track. A foreign athlete asked me to take a picture of her with Jessica Ennis.”
He was left staring into the middle distance at the start of a team press conference that same morning, as the questions all went to Ennis. She gave very little away but spoke well, with a nod and smile at the end of every answer. Not for the first time, David Beckham came to mind.
Nevertheless, one of her fellow competitors had identified the pressure she was under.
The sailor Ben Ainslie said: “Look at Jessica Ennis. I feel really sorry for her because she’s put up there on a pedestal and is expected to be the star of the Olympics and win a gold medal. But nobody really knows how difficult it is.”
To some extent that extra pressure had been created by Team Jennis and the desire to market her. Could she live up to all that love the nation had shown her?
Alison Powell said: “Whatever happens I know that Jess will come out all right. She has a realistic attitude. She wouldn’t be happy if she didn’t win, but she would get over it.”
When the time came, both parents were there by the side of the track in the Olympic stadium side by side, with a union flag. They watched their daughter take her marks for her first event. the 100 metre hurdles, frowning with intense concentration.
The starting pistol sounded — and then she flew over the hurdles, just as she had done as a child all those years ago. Jaws dropped again.
This wasn’t just fast, it was the fastest anyone had ever run in Britain. There were only six more contests to go...
