Jessica Ennis: Unbelievable - From My Childhood Dreams to Winning Olympic Gold Page 6
‘How bad are they?’
His look told me everything and Doc, being a clinician, was not one to sugar-coat the truth. ‘You’re not going to the Olympics,’ he said. It blew me away. All my family had been telling me it would be OK and, deep down, I’d been convincing myself of the same. Neil gave me a hug and had to leave to get me some tissues, but there was more to come. ‘It’s a serious injury,’ Doc said. Then he told me my career might be over. I was twenty-two years old and potentially finished. I cried some more.
I went back to my cell-like room and felt like a condemned woman. I rang my parents and Chell. I could tell from his voice that he was really upset. Derry Suter later told me just how bad Chell had been and that he was really cut up.
I had to stay down in London because I needed a bone density scan. That was horrible because the OMI rooms are like student accommodation. I sat in my room and mulled it over. Neil took me out to a restaurant that night. It was a blur. I don’t know how he coped. I was crying all the time and my face was puffy and red. I don’t know what the waiter must have thought.
Beforehand, Doc had said that if it was just a stress fracture of the metatarsal then it would not be that bad and we could try to make the Olympics. It turned out to be worse, affecting that back part of the foot behind the metatarsals where the blood supply is so poor.
I didn’t want to make it worse and break it. We could have tried to speed up the process by staying off my feet for three weeks, instead of eight, and then having an operation to put screws in to hold it. It was a massive gamble but I was not tempted at all. I desperately wanted to go to Beijing, but not at the risk of ending my career.
The response was incredible. I was so glad to get home to Sheffield and my family and Andy. I had texts, e-mails and cards from all manner of people. Paula Radcliffe passed on her number and said she was there if I needed to talk. I thought that was an impressive thing to do. Paula has been through so many injury crises, but the fact she could be bothered to offer to help when she, too, was racing against time and an ailing body to be fit for the Olympics was quite something.
Another person who rang up was Nathan Douglas, the triple jumper, who had missed the World Championships the previous year with a hamstring injury. Everyone said, ‘Keep your chin up’, but when it is actually happening you don’t want to listen. It feels like your world is falling apart. Words can’t restore that. Nathan understood that. He said people told him he would be back but all he could think about was the missed opportunity. Sometimes it is best not to mollycoddle people. The truth hurts, but half-truths are worse.
Kelly sent me a couple of supportive messages. I thought she had a good chance to take the gold now if she was fit, with Blonska and Tatyana Chernova also in the mix. I didn’t think anyone had looked outstanding on that first day in Götzis, so it was quite open, but that just made it worse, to have to sit at home and try not to think, ‘That could have been me.’ I still don’t know to this day who won that year in Götzis.
It got to me. There was a Sky News report on my injury when I left the hospital on crutches. My dad says he remembers flicking on the TV, seeing that and thinking, ‘Poor kid.’ He also saw the tears. ‘Seeing you cry in public was hard,’ he said. ‘That’s not Jess. You just don’t do that.’
There were so many flowers in the house that it looked like a funeral parlour. It was hard not to wallow in self-pity or become consumed by a flood of what-ifs and why-mes? I knew that everyone got injuries, that they were part and parcel of an athlete’s life, but to devote your life to something and have it snatched away was a bit like suffering a bereavement. You’ve lost something that is part of you. It’s devastating. Heartbreaking.
It was only later that I wondered what it was like for my parents and for Chell. It can’t have been easy for any of them. My dream is the same as Chell’s so he was suffering too. But you get consumed by what is happening to you alone. Later, my mum gave an interview where she explained what it was like for her. She said: ‘It was horrible, just horrible, not being able to put something right for your child. She was absolutely heartbroken. She was living in a little terrace and we went round with a card and some flowers. She had this big contraption that she had to put her foot in twice a day – I’ve still got no idea what it was. She was desperately down, saying, “My career’s over”, “What’s the point?” I think it helped that her boyfriend, Andy, had broken his leg really badly playing football and she had seen him go through that. She had supported him but, of course, it was her career.’
I had looked after Andy after he’d had his accident and in some ways his was even worse. He had broken his tibia and fibula playing football and it had taken nine months to heal properly. It was horrible for him and he did moan – can you get this for me, can you do that? – but now the roles were reversed. I had not coped that well with Andy’s injury when I had gone to the hospital and seen him with an external fixator, effectively a cage, attached to his leg, holding it together. The nurse showed me how to clean the pins. She explained that when he bent his leg the flesh would tear. The thought of that, combined with seeing someone I love in pain, plus the claustrophobic heat in there, meant that before I knew it I was coming around on the floor, with a group of faces all peering down on me and an alarm bell sounding.
I heard Andy’s voice. ‘You’ve always got to be the centre of attention, haven’t you?’ he was saying with a smile on his face.
This time I was. Mum set up a rota of family and friends so there was always someone with me. I think her background in working with people facing crises helped. She knew loneliness can be debilitating for those feeling low and Andy still had a job to go to. Carmel was also on the rota. By now we got on great and the teenage sparring days seemed a long way off. I think a lot of siblings are probably like that and only really become good friends when they are separated. Now she’s also got a career of her own, working with nursery school kids and showing her caring side off to great effect.
I was told I’d be on crutches for two months. Up until then I had been lucky with injuries. There was the time as a kid when I had fallen off a roundabout and gashed my head open. Then there was the Pippi Longstocking day. But in terms of my athletic career, I had been lucky. And now my luck had turned.
There were some very dark days after that. Dave Collins asked me if I wanted to go to the Olympics anyway to taste the whole experience. It would be good for London in another four years, but that seemed an age away. It was impossible to think about 2012 when I was flat on my back for an hour a day on a magnetic bed. It had been shipped in from UK Athletics and had a hood that went over the leg that looked like a Dalek’s head and it weighed about a ton. We had to break it down to get it up the stairs. Andy said that it used up so much electricity that when I switched it on the entire street went dark.
I had two 20-minute sessions on an Exogen machine, too, designed to heal bones via ultrasound waves. It was not proven that it helped but I was prepared to try anything. My attitude was ‘why not?’ If I was ever seriously ill then I am the sort of person who would go from faith healer to acupuncturist in search of a cure. Someone posted a message on my website saying, ‘It’s not how far you fall but how high you bounce.’ It was all nice and encouraging but the words and messages were papering over the cracks in my life and fractures in my foot.
I could see myself literally fading away. As an athlete you work so hard to build yourself up, but I could see my leg getting thinner and thinner. I was forced to watch myself go backwards while the talk in all the papers and on the TV was about those athletes who were in the shape of their lives and were going to go for medals in Beijing.
There was also the issue of money. I felt terrible because I knew how much my family had spent booking tickets and hotels for Beijing. The cost was around £6,000 and I felt guilty that they had lost that. ‘It’s only money, isn’t it?’ my mum said, but I knew they didn’t have a lot. We never have had. I had always been taught the value of mo
ney and it was an added burden to think my family had lost so much because of me.
There was the boredom as well as the depression. I went on the Internet and got even more down via Google search. I read for hours and found lots of examples of people who had suffered with the same sort of injuries for their entire careers. It is definitely not healthy to use the Internet to diagnose yourself; it is certainly unlikely to cheer you up.
I had a protective boot put on the foot. Bill Ribbans, a top orthopaedic surgeon, handled the process. He was caring and brilliant and got the time frame right – two long, hard, bitter months. My physio Ali worked with him to create a rehab programme, and there was a lot of travelling to and from Northampton to see him, and then to and from London for more scans. I spent ages sitting in the car and simmering in near silence, angry that this should happen to me.
The year was a write-off so I looked ahead to 2009 and the indoor season the following spring. Then, looming far enough in the distance to be a realistic goal but not too far away to feel intangible, were the World Championships in Berlin in August 2009. I went to the gym and did weights and core exercises, although they were literally exercises in frustration as I could not put any weight on my foot.
Ali and Derry were devastated too. They felt they were in some way to blame, because it was their area of expertise, but never for one moment did I think like that. The unfortunate thing is that with a stress fracture you hammer away in training and it’s only when the bones fracture – literally when the cracks appear, if you like – that you feel pain and know anything is wrong. They wished they could have done something but they did everything right. It’s such a vague feeling around the navicular that it is hard to diagnose anything unless you have scans every day. I told them they were not to blame at all, because I knew that we were a team and that Chell, Ali, Derry, Mick and I were all collectively heartbroken.
They responded with a huge show of faith. Ali had been working with UK Athletics for a long time, nursing Kelly Holmes through her chronic injuries to a double gold in Athens in 2004, and I sensed she was trying to phase out of it all. I was not sure of Derry’s plans either, but Olympics are turning points for lots of people, not just athletes, and many choose to do other things after them. They sat me down during those rehab days and Derry said: ‘Ali and I have had a chat and we’ve decided we’re going through until 2012 with you.’ I broke out into a rare smile because it felt like such a commitment from them. ‘All of us are going for it,’ he added. ‘We’ve got unfinished business.’
Ali had already helped a lot, not only with her expertise but also with her attitude. She said she thought things happened for a reason. I believe that too. I am not religious but I am fatalistic. I believe you have a journey in life but I don’t believe that it’s all out of your control. I also think you have to be able to blame external things sometimes. If you constantly blame everything on the internal then it’s very hard to get over a disappointment. I don’t mean you always want to be able to say that it was the fault of the weather or the track that you didn’t perform at your best, and I am not advocating passing the buck. But it helps if you can look outside yourself.
Not that I felt that in those early days. I was so down and needed to get my head around it, but before long I wanted to do the rehab. I wanted to get down to the EIS, but I was up and down. Some days I felt like that, flushed with a new sense of positivity and wanting to do the pool sessions or the programme I had for my upper body, but on others I felt terrible and angry that everybody else was getting on with their careers.
I tried another way of coping one night. My friends dragged me out for a night on the town. I didn’t want to go because I was on crutches and wallowing in misery, but I went and enjoyed myself. A bit too much as it turned out. It was the drunkest I have ever been in my life. I got home and could not get the key in the door. Andy was asleep because he had to go to work the next day, so I struggled along in my drunken state and eventually went around the back. Andy later told me that he found me sprawled out on the back step, crutches and rehab boot all over the place. It was probably not that professional but I needed the therapy. For one night only, I just had to get hammered.
Andy had to drive me everywhere. I’d lie across the back seat with my leg up, helpless. I hated the inactivity and the dependency. I didn’t like going out, though, because my hands hurt from the crutches so, more often than not, I would stay at home, watching the box set of Smallville that Andy had bought me, detailing the early, pre-Superman life of Clark Kent. Maybe the following year I could make a similar leap from ordinary Sheffield girl to something quite different. Ultimately, I came to accept that you can’t undo the past.
I was touched by people’s kindness and I knew I was far from unique. I strove to keep perspective and told myself that things happen for a reason, even if you have no idea what that reason may be. I said that maybe I would look back in four years from an Olympic podium and be glad that this happened. I might not have believed it, but I went back to my Smallville life, working away while the rest of the world congregated in Beijing, and told myself this was not meant to be my time.
I did watch the Olympics on television. It was hard for Kelly because just three months earlier she had been in hospital with kidney failure and she had not done a heptathlon for twelve months. She still ran two personal bests and got a season’s best in another event on the first day, but unfortunately she didn’t make the podium. Nataliya Dobrynska was crowned champion with 6733 points, Blonska was second, completing a Ukrainian one-two, and America’s Hyleas Fountain took the bronze medal.
Days later the suspicions gave way to reality and it emerged that Blonska had failed a drug test. I cannot say I was surprised. It was not just that she had previously been banned, it was the fact she had come back from her ban and had turned into a sort of Superwoman, scoring far more points than she had previously. The timeline of cheats in track and field meant that this scenario could not go unchallenged.
When she was stripped of the medal and banned, I inevitably began to think back to the World Championships when I had finished fourth. I had admonished myself for not doing better in the shot put, and so to find I had been beaten by someone who had twice failed a drug test made me angry. That’s the real pain of doping: the impact it has on the innocent.
Kelly later said that she had actually seen Blonska take something while competing in Beijing. It happened as they walked out of the call room. Blonska’s husband, who is also her coach, handed her something. Kelly said she followed her to the long-jump pit and saw that she had a phial. Who knows what was in there? Maybe it was something to mask the drugs. Maybe it was innocent. But Kelly stared her in the eye, daring her to take the substance, and she did just that.
I found the whole thing depressing. The heptathlon is such a tough event that there is a sense of unity among the athletes. You are in it for yourself, of course, but you are also in it together, straining every sinew and driving your body and mind to breaking point in pursuit of the same thing. In women’s athletics, it’s the ultimate test in many ways. To then find someone has ruined all that was hard to take.
After my one night out, I worked hard that winter. It was some of the hardest work I have done because not being able to run is horrible for me. It’s what I do, what I like. It gives me a sense of purpose. I toiled away in the gym and on the cross-trainer. Then I went down for my last scan.
My dad came with me. He is such a placid, kind person. I think he may have sensed me drifting back in time so he would try to cheer me up. ‘You know what, Jess, there is one good thing about not having to go to Beijing.’
‘Oh yeah, what’s that?’
‘No smog. Tell you the truth, I’d been really worried about my asthma.’
The scan was clear. I came out smiling and my dad gave me a hug. He drove me back up the M1 to Sheffield, but stopped at Watford Gap services on the way.
‘Let’s have burgers to celebrate,’ he said. I smiled ag
ain.
6
OPEN WHEN CHAMPION
Trying to get to the top of the podium was a personal dream, but there were lots of people working away behind the scenes to make it happen. In a way it was like a house of cards, with me at the top and a broad base shouldering the load, and like a house of cards I knew it could all come crashing down at any time.
It was during my time injured that my team became complete. I had an agent but was looking for someone new and Chell got introduced to Jane Cowmeadow. When we met we clicked and have never looked back. A lot of agents will get you to do anything as long as they get their cut, but Jane only wanted me to do things that were right for me. And, to be honest, in 2009 the opportunities were still pretty scarce for a broken athlete hobbling around with a fractured foot and a broken dream. Jane’s arrival was a key moment, though, and completed the network of support specialists that people would refer to as Team Ennis. This is the team sheet in full.
TONI MINICHIELLO (Coach): Ah, Chell, what can I say about him? We had been together for more than a decade and sometimes he still treated me like that thirteen-year-old schoolgirl. He was getting better, though, and the main thing was he was a very good coach who devised top programmes. Yes, he would drive me to distraction at times with his criticism and cheese, but I also knew he got the best performances out of me.
ALISON ROSE (Physiotherapist): Ali is such a lovely person and she is passionate about what she does. She had been at the top for a long time, but she did not rest on her laurels and was always looking for ways to further her knowledge. She was also prepared to go the extra mile for me. Many physios work 9 to 5, but Ali would make the effort to see me on a Saturday if that was what was needed. During the injury she rang me every day, asking how it was feeling. Another string to her bow was her capacity to listen. If I had had an argument with Chell then I would go to see her and she let me whinge away. It was somewhere I found I could go to clear my head. She might have a quiet word with Chell afterwards. ‘Say this to her,’ she might suggest, planting seeds to make it all better. There was never any reason for her to feel bad about what had happened – it was just one of those horrible things sport threw at us.