Jessica Ennis: Unbelievable - From My Childhood Dreams to Winning Olympic Gold (6 page)

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.’

It did not go through my head until Kelly said it, the idea that I might have been cheated out of a medal at my first World Championships, but she was right that people had suspicions. Not a lot was said but there were raised eyebrows and rolled eyeballs. Everyone felt that she was not right. There was something about her, putting up bigger scores than she had done before her ban. It tainted the competition because there is a nice feeling in the heptathlon of all being in it together. Unfortunately, drug-taking is part of sport and you try to balance your cynicism with your naivety. There are the classic things that are supposedly telltale signs – the braces on the teeth, the pitted skin, the deep voice. The grapevine whispers said that, whatever the IAAF – the governing body – had said about the World Championships being drug-free, Blonska was doing something very wrong.

In Britain I do not think there is much of a problem and we lead the way in testing athletes. The ‘whereabouts’ system means that you have to say where you will be for an hour a day every day. That can be quite hard to keep track of and, in its early days, there were times when I had to change training sessions and I forgot to update my details. It meant I could easily have had a missed test against my name. Three of those and you get a doping ban. It became much easier when you could update your details online and now I have a testing slot of between 6 and 7 a.m. because I know that I am going to be at home at that time.

That can still be uncomfortable and you may be fast asleep when you get the knock on the door and so you stumble downstairs in your PJs. You get to know the testers because they often cover the same area, but sometimes you may get a random test from an IAAF tester, perhaps a German man you’ve never met before, and so he comes into your house with his gloves and fridge and blood-testing kit.

Once they came and I had been to the toilet two minutes before they arrived. So when they asked for a urine sample I couldn’t give one. We sat on the sofa watching BBC
Breakfast
, while I kept going back to the kitchen to swig more water. It is intensely frustrating because you just want to get on with the rest of your day and training. Now I always make sure I hold it in during the waking hours. It can be very uncomfortable but I know I cannot go to the loo before 7 a.m. because if I can’t perform for the testers they will have to stay with me until I can.

It is a complicated process too. The athlete has to do everything so you fill in forms, separate the samples, screw the tops and divide the bottles. Now we have to wear gloves. I asked why and I was told that there is a substance people have used which they keep under their fingernails and then flick into the samples to neutralize the drugs.

For me this is another world and I can’t comprehend why anybody would go to such lengths to cheat themselves and their rivals. The vast majority of athletes are first and foremost competing for the love of their sport rather than for great financial reward, though of course these days the potential for earning among top athletes is high, so I suppose some people might feel tempted to ditch their morals in order to get up there. But how you could gain any pleasure from success on those terms is beyond me.

When I started competing on the international scene, Chell would always tell me to keep an eye on my water bottle. It sounded fanciful to me, but he was worried that somebody might spike it with something. I do not think anyone would do that, but once he put the thought in my head I decided it was better to be safe than sorry. So ‘water carrier’ was quickly added to his list of duties.

But you have to take responsibility too. I was always taught that you can never shift the blame. It is why I don’t take many supplements because you don’t know, 100 per cent for sure, what is in it. There is an online system now where you can type in the ingredients and it will tell you whether it is prohibited or not, but even so I am sure there are some innocent people being snared in the system. You hear stories about people eating contaminated meat and, in the build-up to London we got an email, warning us to eat only British beef. I am glad the system is so stringent because there are certainly lots of dodgy cases, but it does not make it easy and I just wish that the same measures were implemented in every country. That is why I get annoyed when people start pointing fingers at our sport. Doping is talked about more in athletics, but I imagine it is in all sports. The bad stories never put me off, though. It’s a sport I love.

There was some negative reaction when Christine Ohuruogu came back from a one year ban for missing three tests to win the 400 metres title in Osaka. I saw her case as being totally different to anyone who had failed a test. She had missed three tests, but the ‘whereabouts’ system is a lot clearer now than when it was first introduced. These days we can even text changes to let the testers know we have altered our plans. A lot of people don’t appreciate that athletes have the same chaotic lives as everyone else and can forget things, as Christine did. The process is so strict in Britain that I really can’t imagine how anyone could attempt to cheat, even if they were that way inclined.

I
n the middle of nowhere, surrounded by snow-clad mountains and a glittering lake, lies the little Austrian town of Götzis. The population fluctuates around the 10,000 mark but it increases each summer when the Hypo-Meeting takes place there. This is one of the biggest events in the calendar for the multi-eventers, outside of the major championships. The standard of the competition is out of kilter with the village-fete atmosphere, cut-throat competition being played out in front of people sunning themselves on grassy banks and tucking into bratwurst.

On Friday 30 May 2008 the sun came out and I met the British press on the infield. We sat down and chatted. I knew that I was being talked up in the media as a good hope for a gold medal at the Olympics in Beijing later that summer. Did I think my rivals now regarded me as a serious contender? ‘I fear other people rather than thinking they’re walking round worrying about me,’ I replied. ‘I find it hard to imagine the Olympics. I don’t want to think about getting a medal. Deep down I know it’s what I’m going for, but I don’t want to get wrapped up in it.’

There were other questions about Kelly and Klüft and Blonska. With Carolina deciding to turn her back on the heptathlon and just do the long jump at the Olympics, the pecking order had changed. Carolina was unbeatable, a quite incredible athlete who managed to tether that status to reality without ever losing her generosity. She was widely held in high regard, both as a rival and a person. It was different with Blonska. She had come back from that two-year drug ban in 2007 and won a silver medal at the World Championships. In athletics, there are always nods, winks and innuendos. Suspicions run rife. Rapid improvements or mysterious absences can lead to Chinese whispers of doubt.

That Blonska had come back and scored so highly after her drug ban had caused concern and scepticism among some of the girls. Kelly was always more outspoken than me and again she went public with her remarks, saying that nobody spoke to Blonska. ‘We don’t support drug cheats,’ she added.

I was philosophical and pragmatic about Blonska. She was competing in Götzis and she would be there at the Olympics, probably as the favourite now there was no Carolina. I had to beat her fair and square, whether she was playing by the same rules or not. It is one of the downsides to professional sport, the fact that some people will do anything to win regardless of their conscience.

I had been 363 points adrift of Blonska in Osaka. It was a huge gulf but I had been working hard with Mick Hill and had improved my javelin by five metres. I had once queued up to get Mick’s autograph in Sheffield so it felt odd to have him helping me, and I think he probably looked at me and thought, ‘This girl can’t throw.’ If he did he never said it, though, and his boundless enthusiasm rubbed off.

I was gaining something of a reputation for being sweet and nice, and the press guys on the infield mentioned that Chell had said I could be angry and was even known to swear. ‘We have arguments but so does every athlete and coach,’ I told them. ‘I get frustrated and angry and, yes, I swear. My boyfriend and I have decided we use foul language too much so we’re going to curb it. When I get frustrated I usually just cry, though. Sometimes, if I’ve had a bad session, I go home and cry. Other times I count to ten and try to get myself back together.’

There was also mention of Kelly christening me ‘Tadpole’. I ducked the question, but the truth is I was hurt by it and did not like it. Chell always finds it harder to bury his feelings and so he let rip. ‘The comment was inappropriate and slightly insulting, but it’s part of Kelly’s make-up and I think that’s a bit sad,’ he said. ‘That’s how she competes, by using things like that. It’s potentially gamesmanship.’

I wasn’t worried about that. I was already aware that the press was trying to build up a rivalry between the two of us. Sometimes this would get amusing, not least when I would read stories about the tadpole developing into a big fish. I am not a zoological expert, but even I knew tadpoles actually became frogs.

But, sitting there on the grass, with Kelly absent through injury and the sun warming my neck, I felt relaxed and ready. I had added three strides to my javelin run-up since Osaka and was increasingly confident. I had had a slight niggle in my right foot but thought it was just down to the bulk of training and none of us were worried about it. I soon realized that it is dangerous to get ahead of yourself in this sport. You live in the moment. It is the only way to get the best out of your performance and the only way to stop fretting about how fate might kick you in the teeth at the cruellest moments.

We had decided not to do much of an indoor season. The focus was all on the summer and China. In Olympic year the hype is cranked up until it is easy to forget that it is just another competition, the same rivals and the same track. The 2008 Hypo-Meeting at Götzis would tell me a lot about where I was and whether I was ready.

I felt good. I had worked like a slave during the winter. It had started at the back end of 2007 with the dreaded hill runs. We go through to Christmas, trekking up and down the big, gradual hill in Chelsea Park in Nether Edge. It was around 150 metres long and we would run up and walk back down for our recovery. If we were walking down too slowly then Chell would bark at us from the bottom and let us know.

‘Pick it up! Too slow! Faster!’

The boys might go on ahead, but we were all co-sufferers, caked in mud, breath steaming the freezing air, new aches and pains emerging with each run. We did three sets of five runs up that horrible hill. Then we would do two sets of four on the shorter one. A lot of athletes go warm-weather training in the winter, but I never saw the need. I figured that braving the elements of South Yorkshire was more likely to get me battle-hardened for Beijing.

We would shiver in the car as we were driven back to the EIS for a cup of hot chocolate and then a weights session in the gym. That was our Sunday. I would look at the people getting up late and buying the papers for a long, leisurely read and get jealous.