Jessica Ennis: Unbelievable - From My Childhood Dreams to Winning Olympic Gold Page 4

  But I had my head down now and felt I was making progress. A few weeks later, in August 2005, I went to Izmir in Turkey for the World Student Games. I added a few more points to my overall score and got 5910, enough for third place. The winner that day was a Ukrainian woman called Lyudmila Blonska who would also come to have a significant and slightly sinister part in my story.

  It had been my breakthrough year. I really felt I was getting somewhere now and that there might be a career in it, although I never thought about money. Nobody gets into athletics for that and, if it does come, then that is just a nice by-product. I had some minimal funding and a student loan, but it was still hard to make ends meet and that Christmas I had no money to buy any presents. I was still scratching around but I was also scratching the itch, the nagging thought that I had to do this, and I felt content.

  However, there was still a gulf in class between a top junior and a good senior. I went to the AAAs Championships in July 2005 and was third in the hurdles and joint sixth in the high jump. My wins were coming in meetings like the unspectacularly named Northern League Northern Premier Division, and at places like Cleethorpes and Cudworth. It was hard to find any glamour in the sandpit at Grimsby either.

  I was not a good university student. Not for the usual reasons of staying out late in the bar or sleeping in, but because I had to skip lectures to train. I always tried to catch up and the tutors were great, but it really got hard when I was picked to represent England at the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne in March 2006, a few months before my finals.

  I was sharing a room with Julie Hollman, a heptathlete who had come fifth at the Commonwealth Games back in 2002, but the big stars of the combined events team were Dean Macey and Kelly Sotherton. Both had a lot of personality. Dean was a tattooed maverick from Canvey Island who preferred to talk about maggots and fishing than athletics, while Kelly had a habit of bluntly saying what she thought. She was always totally honest and the media, more used to platitudes and PR niceties, lapped it up.

  The Commonwealth Games were a huge deal to me because it was my first major senior event. At the time my best score was 5910, but in global terms that was the froth of small beer. Carolina Klüft, the Swede who bestrode the event, had clocked 6952 points to win the Olympic gold in Athens, with Kelly scoring 6424 points in third. That seemed a different world.

  ‘Just go out there and enjoy it,’ Chell said. ‘You’ve done the work.’

  I did enjoy it but was a mess of nerves too. Chell could not afford to travel to the other side of the world and so I was there on my own. Even going into the huge dining hall, with all the different food stations, was novel. I had been given my kit and, while proud to be representing my country, I was not enamoured with the ill-fitting, baggy tracksuit that dwarfed me. It’s fair to say that I was not expecting much.

  I had first met Kelly when I was fifteen; I had gone for some warm weather training in Torremolinos. As time went on the media would try to whip up a rivalry between us, but we were just very different people. She was happy to give her opinions whereas I avoided conflict and didn’t like confrontation. That made it hard when she came back to the athletes’ village one night after talking to the media.

  ‘Guess what,’ she said, ‘it’s so funny. I’ve just called you Tadpole to the press.’

  ‘Hilarious,’ I said.

  I knew it wasn’t malicious, but I also knew there was a slight edge to it. She knew the name would stick and it’s not the most flattering. I like my psychology and knew there was some meaning to it, because yes, I was tiny and yes, I did worry about whether I could take on the best in the world. I worried about whether I was too small for the event and that no amount of work would compensate for being five feet five inches and going up against people more than half a foot taller. It was my first taste of that environment and, even though Kelly said she meant ‘Tadpole’ to be affectionate, I was annoyed.

  Maybe it fired me up because I started well in Australia. The high jump was particularly good. Kelly managed 1.85 metres but I jumped 1.91, which would have been good enough to win the gold medal in the individual event. I felt like I was flying. I scored four personal bests and was in the shake-up for the silver medal until I was overhauled by Australia’s Kylie Wheeler in the 800 metres.

  Nevertheless, Kelly was consistent enough to get the gold medal with 6396 points. Wheeler was second and I completed the podium. Afterwards Kelly spoke of ‘the little English girl’ snapping at her heels. ‘She bit me quite hard,’ she added. A journalist pointed out that the not-so-subtle Tadpole barb mirrored the way Denise Lewis, the 2000 Olympic champion, had coined her own nickname for Kelly when she was the rising star. That was news to me but I told the reporter: ‘I’d rather be a Princess than a Tadpole.’

  Kelly had a moan about her javelin and said she would not be getting major medals unless she improved. ‘It was harder here because I had another English girl on my heels,’ she said. ‘But I wouldn’t want it any other way. It made me work harder and I couldn’t let her beat me.’

  I didn’t care. I knew we were just very different personalities. It must be weird when you have been dominating your event and then someone else comes along. That is always going to ruffle your feathers, although everyone knows that a younger athlete will end up being better than you. I learnt from that. I realized that you are never going to be at the top forever, so you had better enjoy your time and be gracious about it. Kelly might have meant nothing by her remark, but I would never say anything like that about Katarina Johnson-Thompson, who is next in line and on the way up now. Kelly had the gold, but I felt like I had my own. I had added well over 300 points to my personal best. I went home and went out into town with Andy. We headed to a bar called Vodka Revolution and I was the guest at a surprise party, with friends, family and ‘Well done’ banners. My friend Katie’s mum had even made me a cake with a medal iced on it. It was a start. The World Championships were coming up and now I wanted to have my cake and eat it.

  4

  THE ODD COUPLE

  It’s almost hard to remember a time before Chell. We clash with as well as complement each other and have a working, dysfunctional relationship. He mocks me and I take the mickey. In some ways we are like an old, married couple, bound together by history and an affection that neither of us ever voices.

  It has been a twisting path. The athlete-coach relationship is an odd one in athletics as people often stay together for long periods. I had first met Chell in 1998 when I had just started athletics, and teaming up with him in 1999 was the start of a long, at times turbulent, but successful relationship.

  The strange thing for Chell is that he started coaching me when I was a thirteen-year-old schoolgirl. Sometimes he forgets what has happened since, that I have been to university, left home and become a woman. I am still that little girl he used to drive hard. Sometimes that was hard for me because I was a normal girl and I wanted to do lots of things. Chell was a coach and he could see the potential, but it was difficult when I would come home from training in tears about something he’d said. It was not easy for my parents to sit back, especially when my future as an athlete was hanging by a thread, and there were plenty of days when I didn’t want to go training.

  Chell’s job was to push me to the limit and, as time went on, I realized that. I called him the king of cheese and, much later, the DJ Chris Moyles would dub him Minicheddars as a play on his surname – it’s quite ironic as they are dead ringers for each other. The cheesy references reflect his insistence on making cheesy statements – nobody can mix a metaphor or do psychobabble quite like him. Once he told me that I should not worry about competing at London because of cockroaches.

  ‘Cockroaches?’ I said.

  ‘There was a study,’ he began. ‘They timed a cockroach running across a strip. Then they timed it with two cockroaches watching. Then they did it with a load watching. They found that even a cockroach runs faster if other cockroaches are watching it.’

 
‘So the moral of the story is . . .’

  ‘You don’t have to worry about eighty thousand people in the Olympic Stadium.’

  ‘I wasn’t.’

  He says there are seven boxes in the brain and, when they are full, that is when rational thought goes out of the window. He tells me to de-clutter my mind and empty the boxes. We rage at each other and there are plenty of times when I storm out of sessions. I get a bit tearful but I never go home. I can’t because I know I need to train. I just can’t leave. It’s always petty things, but he can be patronizing and still speak to me as if I am at junior school.

  I stumble out of the house each morning at about 9 a.m. I am not an early riser. I am actually a lazy person in many ways. Then I see Chell and we restart our volatile relationship of little feuds. He will say something sarcastic and I will bite.

  Much later we went to see a psychologist. Even though I was a psychology student, I have never been a great advocate of sports psychology. My belief is that it comes from within and that much of what is often said is the blindingly obvious. No matter how much visualizing or role-playing you do, the fact is you also need to work and work, on the track and in the gym and up your own Heartbreak Hill.

  Nevertheless, there was a time when we sought help. And, typically for our relationship, it was about how we work together rather than setting any specific sporting goals. Chell says there are four colours of motivation. Red is for drive, green for planning, yellow for innovation and blue for relationships.

  The way he put it to me was this: ‘If we had to climb a mountain the reds would be saying. “Let’s get to the top.” The greens would want a map, the yellows would ask if there was another way of getting up and the blues would ask if everybody was happy. I’m very red-yellow and you’re red for drive and green for needing a plan.’

  He reads a lot and likes his theories so that was interesting. He loves the film Any Given Sunday and is prone to making the Al Pacino speech near the end. ‘You’ll find out life is just a game of inches,’ Chell will growl as Pacino.

  Ten days before a competition, the tension will rise and we will argue. He will get out his book of stats and tell me what I should be doing. He has a 95 per cent column and a 98. Each one is a percentage of my personal best in each discipline. Tot them up and you get a heptathlon score. He told me: ‘On a bad day, with a howling gale and the rain coming down, you should be between those parameters.’ People do it in different ways and I do it more by feel and instinct, although I know my scores and what I should be achieving. Then there’s my dad, who just watches me for fun and has no idea of any personal bests. He just wants me to do well.

  After getting the bronze medal in the Commonwealth Games in Melbourne in March 2006, I rang my mum straightaway. Then I rang Chell. I could tell that he was excited, but I would come to find that there are different ways of dealing with success. I fly on a massive high, but Chell takes the opposite route. When things go well he actually suffers a bit of a downer. There is also an embarrassed half-hug and handshake afterwards. We are very different people. I will be basking in the moment but he is already looking to the next thing. That is good in some ways, but it’s also sad and you can’t move too quickly.

  I had gone to the European Championships in Gothenburg in early August 2006 and put in another good performance. More personal bests in the shot put and 200 metres put me in a great position, but the competition was fierce and even an improved score of 6287 points was good enough for only eighth. Carolina Klüft won again, maintaining a winning streak that would last for twenty-two competitions and stem back four years to 2002. She was peerless, an incredible champion who looked impossible to beat.

  Being up against Klüft and co meant that Gothenburg felt surreal for me, and the following year the World Championships in Osaka, in August 2007, were even more so. In athletics the whole year is based around one major championship – the Europeans, Worlds and, ultimately, the Olympic Games. You might warm up with the indoor season and, while that is serious stuff, it is very much the appetizer for the summer.

  Things were changing for me both professionally and personally. Hannah, my friend who also trained with Chell, had stopped doing athletics and was focused on becoming a dentist. She had decided that was a more viable career path for her. I ended up being the only constant, everybody else dropping out, one by one, as time passed, although new people would join to bolster the numbers. We started training next door at the new English Institute of Sport, EIS for short, and in 2006 I also moved with Andy to a little rented terrace house. He was working as a construction site manager and I liked the fact we had something else to talk about at night. I got my degree, a 2:2, which I was happy enough with given that I had missed so much term time.

  Any thoughts of an alternative career were on hold for me. I was now immersed in the senior British team and eagerly anticipating the World Championships in Osaka, a sprawling industrial city in Japan. Before that, in early March 2007, I went to the European Indoor Championships in Birmingham. Inevitably, Klüft won, with Kelly second in a new British pentathlon record, just 17 points adrift. I was sixth and frustrated. I watched Nicola Sanders, who would become a friend and room-mate on trips, win the 400 metres, and I looked around the National Indoor Arena. ‘Why can’t it be me?’ I said to myself. ‘It’s not fair.’

  My great-grandad was ninety-four and was really ill at the time, too. I left early because I needed to get home to say goodbye to him, but sadly he died before I made it. He was surrounded by family at home and had lived a full and happy life, but it was terribly sad and made worse by the fact I hadn’t been there. Mum was really close to him and was badly affected by his death, but we had lots of good memories. He had a warm, dry sense of humour, as shown by the first time Andy met him. ‘Hi, I’m the Godfather,’ he said.

  It was a difficult time for us all, and Mum in particular, but I was soon back training. I wanted to make up for Birmingham in Osaka in August, but I knew how hard it was going to be. I started brightly and clocked a personal best in the hurdles. The high jump was a solid 1.89 metres. The conditions were stifling, an intimidating heat that meant you were dripping with sweat just walking to the track, but there was no excuse for the abject shot put of just 11.93 metres, my worst of the year. In a flash, any medal chance had gone. That was a horrible feeling.

  Klüft was way ahead by the time we got to the 800 metres, the final event. She ended up with a mind-boggling tally of 7032 points. It would be the best performance of her amazing career, topped only by Jackie Joyner-Kersee in the all-time list. I was still in a fight with Kelly for the bronze. I needed to beat her by about two seconds to get it. I gave it everything, left every last vestige of effort on the track, but was only 0.19 seconds clear at the end. It meant I missed out on the bronze by forty-one points.

  Maybe people expected me to be mortified after the shot put, but I actually saw Osaka as an achievement. I was up there with the best, had beaten them at the hurdles and 200 metres, and knew I needed to up my game in the weaker events. The other girls were generous too. Kelly was collared by the BBC trackside interviewer, Phil Jones, and said: ‘She’s the future. Everybody else better watch out.’ At the end of the heptathlon the girls all do a lap of honour together. It is the only event where they do that, but it shows that we have been through the same mill. Klüft put her arm round me and said: ‘This will be you one day.’ I smiled and thought she was a good example of how to behave as a champion. I had first competed against her in 2005 in Arles in France. I was a nobody and she was the queen of her sport, at the peak of her powers, but I remember her making a point of saying hello to me. She was like the matriarch of the event. She is such a warm person and yet she was one of those who would slap her thighs, scowl and exude aggression before competing.

  I have never been that way and Chell would berate me for it. ‘You’ve got to be more aggressive in the way you attack things,’ he said.

  Even my dad said: ‘You’ve got to give it more
, “ugggghh”.’

  That’s not me, though. I liked watching people like Klüft get themselves psyched up, but I was different. Get like that and I would tense up, so I would quietly slip into my blocks instead. People would tell me I wasn’t trying, but I always was. It might have added to the image of me as being someone who could be swatted away, and I heard some of the girls commenting on my size in the early days.

  ‘Look at her, she’s so small.’

  That definitely fired me up on the inside. I wanted to show them, prove a point and prove myself. Over the years, Chell came to realize I was just as aggressive in my own way, but I was different and so he began to use different language.

  When it came to exuding that aggression and confidence, the sprinters were in a different world. They strut their stuff and walk through the athletes’ village, looking at the women as if eyeing their prey for when they have finished competing. It sometimes had the air of a cattle market. I think you have to be a certain kind of person to be a sprinter. You need a degree of arrogance, although that has changed in recent years with some of them getting older, having kids and ditching the macho posturing.

  The aftermath of the World Championships in Osaka was dominated by Kelly’s remarks about Lyudmila Blonska, who had been second to Klüft. Blonska set a new Ukrainian national record on the way to her silver medal. For many her return raised question marks, given that she had spent two years out of the sport on a doping ban and had also had a baby during her absence.

  ‘You still have doubts and ninety-nine per cent of us have doubts about certain athletes,’ Kelly told BBC Radio. ‘Unfortunately, she’s one of them. I hope she’s clean. I really do because it would please me and everyone else. We’ll find out.’