Jessica Ennis: Unbelievable - From My Childhood Dreams to Winning Olympic Gold (11 page)

‘Can you come home? There’s something’s wrong with me.’

The EIS doctor, Richard Higgins, came out and said it was probably a virus that was affecting my inner ear. He prescribed some tablets and said that my balance would improve. Sure enough it did for a few days, but then I had another attack and it was back to square one. You start to imagine the worst in situations like that, especially after I went back to Google. I read about people who had the same thing and could never drive again. Before long I was wondering if my career was over again. The latest dizzy spell was far worse than the others. It was like being spun around endless times. I saw Richard Higgins and he said I should see an ear, nose and throat specialist. I went along and the specialist said there were two options. The first was to take a course of tablets for three weeks, with the side effects of feeling sick and having headaches, or I could try the Epley manoeuvre.

I did not know what it was but I did know that it sounded vaguely painful.

‘It could clear it up within a day,’ he said.

‘Great.’

‘Or it could make it worse.’

I often think that doctors hand out medication a bit too freely and so, having dragged Andy along with me to the specialist, I said I thought I should try the Epley manoeuvre. That was when the doctor got behind me, grasped my head and jerked it gently one way at 45 degrees. Then he did it the other way 90 degrees.

A few days later I went for a brain scan. They are always anxious times as you wonder what on earth they might find in there. I hoped for the best and feared the worst. I began to worry that I might have a brain tumour. It took me back to the scan I’d had on my injured foot two years before. I remembered how everybody had told me it would be all right and there was nothing to worry about, only for the cold, hard facts of an X-ray to prove them all wrong. It was the same this time.

‘Don’t worry,’ everybody said. ‘It will be nothing.’

This time they were right. I got the all-clear and felt a huge, unseen burden lift. I asked the consultant what could have been the cause.

‘There could be any number of reasons,’ he said.

‘Like what?’

‘Well, have you been under any stress lately?’

Stressed! As an athlete you are always stressed. You win a competition but quickly look to the next one. The goalposts are constantly shifting. The pressure close to a major event is huge. Most of it is internal pressure you put on yourself to turn all the hard work into your best, but there was growing external pressure too, from the public, the sponsors and the media. I had made it look quite easy in Berlin and that was a curse really, because this was really very hard.

So I might have been stressed without even knowing it. For years the American 400 metres runner, Sanya Richards-Ross, thought she was suffering from a condition called Behçet’s Disease that left her with mouth ulcers and skin lesions. It sounded horrible and was brought on by stress. Although she later said she had been misdiagnosed, there is no doubt stress can be a debilitating thing for an athlete, at the same time as having positive benefits in some ways.

I had missed three weeks and, when I was then made the team captain for the Europeans, my stress levels rose even higher. I am proud to represent Great Britain, but I am not a confident person. I felt it would be rude and ungrateful to turn down the offer, but the thought of having to give a team speech, as is the tradition, kept me up at night. Part of me thought that it would be good to put myself out of my comfort zone, but I didn’t enjoy the experience at all.

A year on from Berlin and we were heading to another Olympic Stadium. The capacity had been reduced considerably since then and the football club that used to play there, Espanyol, had moved out. At some sessions there were big spaces on the terraces, but I still felt those same echoes of the past swirling around on the wind. Linford Christie was invited by Charles van Commenee to give us a speech. He actually read out a poem about his own experiences of winning the Olympic 100 metres gold in Barcelona back in 1992.

I was far too young to remember any of that, but I was moved by his poem. It was short and quite funny. Then he read out another one, titled ‘Desiderata’, by the American poet Max Ehrmann. It ended with the lines:
‘With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams/It is still a beautiful world/Be cheerful/Strive to be happy . . .’

I cannot say that I am a particular fan of poetry, but with Linford reading that out, in the vicinity of the Olympic Stadium, and with all of us preparing to compete, it touched a nerve. It also made me feel even more nervous when I had to give my speech. I don’t think it would win any prizes, but I spoke about my injuries and making the most of opportunities. Some people are naturally better at being captain. Dai Greene would lead the team in London and was great. Goldie Sayers was another good one, a lovely person who put individual notes under all our doors before one competition. For me, the role was a burden.

The captaincy added to my media commitments ahead of the Europeans, and I was aware that my profile was rising, not least when Charles said I would be the only athlete judged a failure if I did not win gold in Spain.

‘I will still be young in 2012, only twenty-six, but you have a shelf life in the heptathlon,’ I told
The Times
that day in Barcelona. ‘The body can only take so much. It’s all the training no one sees. Eventually, the body says it’s had enough. I don’t know whether that will be after 2012, and what happens afterwards also depends on whether I’ve achieved everything I’ve wanted to. I just want to feel satisfied. I think you know when that is.’

My shelf life as the ‘Leader’, the bib they give to the heptathlete who heads the rankings after each event, was threatened in Barcelona. Dobrynska had turned up in great shape and I expected it to be close. In the end it came down to a matter of inches.

The nerves and stress were bubbling before the hurdles. Chernova was one of two girls to false-start in my heat. It meant that anyone else false-starting would be disqualified and out of the running. In those circumstances you tell yourself to stay in the blocks. Don’t go until the gun. Sometimes, though, as I would find out to my cost in the future, your subconscious takes over.

I got out fast, was smooth over the hurdles and clocked 12.95 seconds. It was a good start and I backed it up with 1.89 metres in the high jump. It had been raining that morning so I was happy enough, but Dobrynska was fighting hard. She is far more powerful in the shot and so my lead was trimmed to just 11 points after three events. Whereas many events are seriously weakened at the Europeans because of the lack of American and Caribbean athletes, the heptathlon was a line-up of all the top girls, with the exception of Fountain. It was hard, fast and gruelling. I made up more points in the 200 metres, clocking 23.21 seconds, but I knew Dobrynska could strike back at me in the long jump and javelin. It had never been closer.

It was the same on day two. I was still unconvinced by my long jump. Everyone told me that I should be able to jump much further because of my speed on the runway, but it just was not happening. Somewhere in me, though, is that competitive gene, the attention-seeking bit that thrives on the pressure and the big stage. Dobrynska laid down a marker by jumping a season’s best of 6.56 metres, but I responded with 6.43 metres on my last jump. The damage had been limited. I’d done the same in the shot put, saving the best until last, all those sessions with John and the wagers struck for chocolate paying off.

Dobrynska was not giving up, though. She managed her best-ever javelin throw, 49.25 metres, to keep snapping away at my heels. I also threw better than ever, reaching 46.71 metres, and when the scores were totted up and sums done, I basically knew she had to beat me by two seconds in the 800 metres. My parents had come out to Spain and this was the first major championships they had been to. Andy was also there and so was Carmel, who watched my javelin and swiftly brought me back down to earth by saying: ‘Blimey, you can actually throw now.’

I could have tucked in behind Dobrynska in the 800 metres and tracked her, making sure the gap never grew into a defeat, or I could have gone out and run hard from the front. I chose the latter. It’s the way I like to run. I am small and don’t want to get beaten up. I hit the front and, instead, Dobrynska tracked me. I could see her on the big screen. On the penultimate bend she made her move and edged past me. I was not having that and responded. I knew that I needed to run 2 minutes 9.59 seconds to break Denise’s British record at last. I saw off Dobrynska and crossed the line in 2.10.18. The winning margin was 45 points which equates to about three inches in the long jump. It had been a competition of broad scope and fine margins.

It felt amazing. I was the world and European champion. There was only one thing missing now, and the talk of London increased even though it was two years away. I joined up with Andy, my family, and the team and went down Las Ramblas. It was late and there were a dozen of us so it was hard to get in anywhere. We ended up outside a tapas bar but they said it was full. I was tired, hungry and felt annihilated. A TV screen hung on a wall inside and it flashed to my 800 metres. Andy started pointing at me.

‘That’s her, it’s her,’ he said.

The man looked at the screen and then at me. He paused for a second while he made the connection.

‘Come in,’ he said.

It wasn’t the only door that would be opened on the back of a gold medal.

I
t was a letter I got at the end of 2010 that showed me there is another, less welcome side to being in the public eye. I was one of many athletes who chose not to go to the Commonwealth Games, staged in Delhi in October 2010. The reason was simple. They were being held far too late in the year. My year is built around the major summer championships and training blocks are geared to that, so travelling to India in October was going to throw everything out of synch.

There were all sorts of problems in the build-up to Delhi and some people were portrayed as cowards for not competing there. For me, though, it had nothing to do with security, dengue fever, dodgy safety certificates or falling footbridges. It was just bad timing.

One man did not see it that way. He sent me a very long letter explaining how disappointed he was and how I was letting the whole country down. How could I turn down the opportunity to represent my country? He was clearly someone who would die for England and he raged on. ‘I will not be supporting you in 2012,’ he concluded. I found that upsetting.

There have been other messages, including a few about death. One man said he wanted to take Myla out for a walk and spoke about us walking on a beach and dying together. That got reported to the police. There are others that are a bit creepy. Generally, I try to take them lightly and with a bit of humour, but Andy gets worried. There can also be a few intense and, at times, rather creepy people around the tracks too. Maybe it is the fact that it’s a sport where women do not wear a great deal. I find that the best policy is to be respectful and polite wherever possible, while Jane generally tried to keep anything odd away from me.

Generally, though, I get nice letters. After Berlin I received lots of lovely messages from kids addressed simply to ‘Jessica Ennis, World Champion’. There would be autograph requests and homemade cards. I was touched.

People are usually nice and the opportunities that winning the world and European titles brought were beyond a Sheffield schoolgirl’s dreams. So when Adidas asked Jane if I would like to go to Los Angeles to do a photo-shoot with David Beckham, she said yes immediately and added that she would need to come too.

Andy also came along as chaperone and we flew out to a lovely boutique hotel, the Sunset Marquis in West Hollywood. It was a haven for proper stars rather than a Yorkshire heptathlete. In one corner sat Usher, the R&B megastar, flanked by huge bodyguards. I said hello and was unashamedly starry-eyed. Apparently, there was a recording studio at the hotel and Cheryl Cole was also staying there.

On the day of the shoot we were driven up into the Hollywood hills to a huge glass-fronted mansion that looked out over the city. I sat in a room with David Beckham’s hair and make-up people and then I did my shoot. There was an air of expectancy as we awaited his arrival. When he did come, he politely shook everyone’s hand and asked how we were. He had an aura and I could feel everyone staring at him, but I imagine he is used to it. We did some pictures together and he showed me his scar from his Achilles injury. He was as nice and grounded as anyone you’ll meet. His music was playing in the house through his iPod. When a song came on that had some swearing in it, he rushed in and told someone to change it because his kids were around. I noticed how his kids tore all over the grounds, pursued by bodyguards, and could not imagine how he managed to live like that and remain so normal. I had experienced it on a tiny scale, but he could not go anywhere in the world without someone checking the house and watching over his kids. I thought it must be a weird life, but he was so approachable and normal and I liked him a lot. Some celebrities are only interested in their own worlds, but he asked me about training and injuries and then told me he wanted more kids. If I’d been a journalist it would have been a world exclusive, and I remember thinking how open he had been. I have since grown to realize that sportspeople have a real respect for one another and a mutual trust.

With the gold medals came some fantastic sponsorship opportunities, particularly with the Olympic ones, and I began to do more photo-shoots. One of the first was at Forgemasters, the steelworks just down the road from where I train. The theme was simple enough, me being forged of Sheffield steel, but the shoot was more problematic. Obviously, it was blindingly hot in there and one man had the task of literally making sparks fly as the camera clicked. It was a normal day’s work for the men there, and so it was slightly odd to be standing there in a fairly skimpy athletics kit, with a throng of men in goggles looking on. As the sparks flew I thought, ‘This is a bit close’, and it was not the safest environment for a wannabe Olympic athlete, with metal strips lying around the floor, but the pictures were great.