Jessica Ennis: Unbelievable - From My Childhood Dreams to Winning Olympic Gold (9 page)

STEVE INGHAM (Physiologist): Steve was always on hand to give advice on preparing for the dreaded 800 metres, from the types of sessions I need to do in preparation for it, to what I need to do to ensure I get through a race, with all that it might throw at me physically. He was so knowledgeable, and I really felt that if anyone could make doing an 800 metres bearable, he was the man.

JANE COWMEADOW (Agent): Jane, and her right-hand woman, Suzi Stedman, became good friends after we teamed up in 2009. Jane was more like a second mum, not just cutting deals but making sure my family were in the right place in stadiums and doing things that would bring her no return. She was always going that extra mile to make life as easy as possible so that I could give training and competing my total focus.

That was Team Ennis, all cogs in a machine to keep things rolling. Every member of the team played a big part in reviving me during that bitter post-Beijing winter. Ultimately, it was my life and my career, but you need your help, friends and sounding boards. So when the gloom slowly lifted, I wrote off the year. I scrubbed Beijing from my mind and instead pencilled in the IAAF World Combined Events Challenge in Desenzano del Garda for my heptathlon comeback at the start of May 2009.

It was a deeply unsettling time. Dave Collins was sacked as performance director after the team only managed four medals in Beijing, with Christine getting the only gold. I had been scared of him when I came into the senior ranks, but in truth, it did not make much difference to me who was in charge. One of Dave Collins’s innovations was to give athletes marks out of ten for their performance. He did that at the European Championships in Gothenburg and it caused a big fuss. Some people were given two out of ten and even Paula Radcliffe went public and said: ‘I absolutely hate it.’ I am not sure what he wanted to achieve by it but I can’t even remember my score.

His replacement was Charles van Commenee. He had been involved with UK Athletics before as technical director of combined events and Chell had told him that he had a rising star and tried to get him interested in me back in the early days. He had replied I was too young.

He was famed for his ‘wimp’ comment directed at Kelly and he ruffled some feathers with his approach, but again he did not have much to do with me. I was working with Chell and my team and was left to get on with it.

I was wrapped up in my own struggles anyway. The injury was bad and then Chell dropped his own bombshell as we did a long-jump session.

‘Why don’t you change your take-off foot?’ he said.

I laughed incredulously. ‘No way!’

‘Just give it a go.’

‘No!’

The idea of having to change my take-off foot was simply awful. The long jump was an event I was already struggling with and now, on the comeback trail, with the World Championships looming, he wanted me to reprogramme my brain.

The problem was that I would charge down the runway and stick out my right foot as if it was the high jump. That acted as a brake. It would arc me into the air rather than through it, and that meant I was dropping short. Chell described it as educating the neural pathways to get the left foot to behave differently. ‘I want you flying like a plane off the end of an aircraft carrier.’

I was reluctant to change as I thought it would only make things worse. People spend years training to make things instinctive, so to then go back to basics and rebuild it from scratch sounded daunting. Yet, in the back of my mind, I was scared about the injury too. I wanted to jump like I had before, but it was only now that I considered the force that went through the body with every jump. I thought, ‘What if I never master this event? If this doesn’t go right then I’ve wrecked everything.’ So, reluctantly, we started to rebuild me.

I did little drills to start with but it got harder and harder. Every little niggle, real or imagined, sent me into panic mode. I didn’t know if the bone would fuse properly and I knew I might end up with bone spurs, which could cause pain, swelling and worse, leaving me unable to achieve all that I wanted.

Bricey came along and helped. He explained how I planted my foot with my toe and then collapsed through the knee. I treated it like a high jump, one of my favourite events, and had my foot out in front of me, when it should be underneath. We looked at videos, frame by frame, and tried to correct things and search for the small gains. The injury had given me little choice. I had to protect the broken foot and so I worked slavishly to get used to jumping the other way round.

I made my comeback in January 2009 at the Northern Athletics Senior Indoor Championships. I did the 60 metre hurdles and came second in 7.56 seconds. It was a low-key event and pretty low-grade running, but it was a start and I was not injured. After months in the gym I felt like an athlete again. A weight lifted.

I then went to Cardiff for the McCain Inter City Cup Final and long-jumped 5.98 metres. That was pretty appalling and did not fill me with confidence about the new system. To put it in context, I consider 6.40 metres my minimum requirement in a heptathlon. I was miles off.

We went to a variety of small meetings at the start of that year to ease me back in. I threw the javelin in Cleckheaton, Bedford and Sheffield, topping 40 metres regularly. The shot put has never been one of my best events, but it was okay. However, I don’t think I realized quite how much tension I was feeling until I went to Desenzano in May for my first heptathlon since Götzis.

The hurdles was first up. All I think about when I’m in the blocks are the first few strides. Get them right. That’s what matters. I thought back to all the drills we had done at the EIS. All those times we set out the hurdles. We used two sets, one silver and one red. That was because the video analysis showed that I lengthened my stride after the sixth hurdle. The colours were a visual aid to remind me to chop my stride and keep the rhythm and speed. I lined up, got away well and felt good. I kept my stride length right. I did not clout any hurdles. That can be costly, in flesh as well as time, as I knew from the time John, a training partner, clipped a hurdle down at the EIS. I went over to him and was laughing because he had taken a calamitous tumble, but then I realized his face was ghostly white. He lifted his shorts and I realized the base of the hurdle had flipped and scythed through his thigh, tearing a strip and leaving the muscle exposed. When Chell saw the damage he had to go over to the other side of the track and lie down with his feet up. I went to get some ice, while John turned whiter. That was the worst-case scenario. This time I did not hit anything. I got it right and flew over the line in a time of 12.98 seconds. That was good. Dip below 13 seconds and it’s a solid start in my head.

It went on from there. The high jump was good, 1.90 metres, and I felt no problems with my foot. Inevitably, I thought about what had happened in Götzis, but this time it was fine. I had my ping back. The shot put was okay, 13.19 metres, and it was a good first day, but the following morning I would face the long jump and javelin, the two events that would be highlighted as Achilles heels all the way from Lake Garda to East London.

I did well enough in both. The long jump was 6.16 metres, which was a disappointment but not a disaster. It was a work-in-progress and I was in a good place in the competition. I threw the javelin 42.70 metres and then clocked a career-best 2 minutes 9.88 seconds in the awful 800 metres. It meant I had won convincingly. I was more than 500 points clear of the field and it was quickly pointed out that I was third on the all-time UK list with 6587 points. Immediately, I was installed as one of the favourites for the World Championships, but I also knew how much harder that was going to be.

I even stayed smiling at the post-competition banquet. I heard the announcer say my name a few times, but she was speaking in Italian and so I was not sure what she was talking about. Everyone at my table said they were calling me to go up and get my trophy. I traipsed up to the stage, oblivious to the strange looks I was getting from certain quarters, and stood at the side of the stage. The woman kept talking and slowly it dawned on me that they had not called out my name at all and had merely been discussing the day’s events. I had little choice but to stand there for what seemed like an eternity and cringe away in silence. It was one of the most excruciating experiences of my life. There was a lot of sniggering and, when I finally made it back to my table, flushed with embarrassment, Ali was creased up with laughter. ‘I thought you were my friends,’ I said, laughing.

Before a competition the tension is always ratcheted up in those last days. Andy says he can pinpoint my mood swings in terms of miles. When we set off in the car to a competition I am fine and chatty, but by the time we have got to the other side of Snake Pass, the A57 road between Sheffield and Manchester, I am quiet and snappy. Grandad tells me I was the same as a junior, gradually receding more and more into myself the closer I got to an athletics track.

Andy had decided to travel out to Berlin to watch the World Championships. My agent Jane was also there, but my mum and dad had decided to stay at home. We had talked about it beforehand; they knew I felt bad because they had lost so much money on the Beijing trip that never was.

‘Will you be offended, Jess, if we don’t go?’ my mum asked.

‘It’s up to you,’ I replied.

‘I just don’t want you worrying about anything else. It would be best for you to just concentrate.’

My dad smiled and gave me a hug. ‘Make sure you ring us, though.’

I have only recently started to appreciate how hard it is for my parents. My dad says it’s awful as a spectator. ‘I love watching you do the hurdles because you are so good at it, but I hate it at the same time,’ he told me. ‘It’s where it can all go wrong. One mistake.’

My mum says it’s horrible too. She just wants me to do well for myself, but I knew they would be nervous and fretting at home, and that not being there would just let their imaginations think the worst. My mum is not superstitious, but she later told me that, after the injury, she just did not want to jinx anything. Three days before I competed she stopped eating. It was a crippling fear, not about me winning or losing, but about me being happy. For an athlete those two things are intertwined, and happiness was now dependent on the world title bid.

The Olympic Stadium in Berlin is swathed in memories. Figures of famous athletes stand outside and there is a plaque to commemorate Jesse Owens’ feats at the 1936 Olympics. He broke down barriers and humiliated Hitler, but that was several generations ago. Although I could feel the echoes of the past, I was in my bubble, in the here and now.

It had been a hell of a journey up to Berlin and it had not been totally smooth behind the scenes. Chell often struggles to bite his lip when he senses injustice and so he gave an interview ahead of the World Championships where he voiced his grievances. ‘There was a great team around Jess and it’s been decimated,’ he said. ‘London will be harder now so it’s unfortunate that I’ve lost a nutritionist, a physiologist and a performance analyst.’

He said it was down to changes at UK Athletics and people moving jobs. Two had moved into other sports and Steve Ingham took over as lead physiologist at the English Institute of Sport so would not be working directly in athletics. ‘It’s a step into the future via a crystal ball and I don’t work on crystal balls,’ he said.

For me the biggest worry was that Ali Rose would not be one of the physios travelling with the team to Berlin. After what I had been through with my foot, all the days, weeks and months of rehab, I trusted her implicitly. The fact she would not be in Berlin was a hammer blow. However, in the end we found a way for Ali to come out and I breathed a huge sigh of relief.

Toni was incredulous that Alison had not been considered necessary. ‘The person who knows how to fix Jess between events is Alison Rose, so I had to get her there any way I could,’ he said in an interview. ‘Christ, do you think Manchester United don’t cover everything? I am sure a lot of people will draw kudos if she wins, but they say success has many friends but failure is an orphan.’

I knew what he meant. People make a fuss about you when you do well, but you are quickly forgotten about when you are injured or not performing well. It’s a fickle world and I prefer people to treat you the same way in the good and bad times.

I led the world rankings going into Berlin in August 2009, but I knew it was going to be tough. There was Nataliya Dobrynska, the Olympic champion from Ukraine. She was far taller and had more muscle than me. Dobrynska trained in a decrepit stadium on the outskirts of Kiev, daubed with graffiti and with holes in the black indoor track. She said she carried a spade in her boot to dig over the long-jump pit and that teenagers gathered in the shadow of the grey stadium wall to drink and make mischief. She was tough.

There was also Tatyana Chernova, a tall, thin Russian who had a habit of doing handstands to warm up and had taken a bronze in Beijing at the age of just twenty. All the best heptathletes in the world were present and the nerves reverberated around my brain and body.

I started well. I shot out of the blocks in the hurdles, crossed the line and looked to the scoreboard. It flashed up 12.93 seconds. I’d run a lifetime best of 12.81 seconds a few weeks earlier, but I was not complaining. I had not started that well in Desenzano and so I was on my way. In the back of my mind a voice was telling me that something was going to go horribly wrong, or that I would fall over, so it was a huge relief to finish safely.

It was hard for all of us to keep our cool in the white heat of competition. There were twenty-nine of us vying for the same prize. The high jump was next and I cleared 1.92 metres. That was above average for me and I felt something good happening. You can never get ahead of yourself in the heptathlon because there are seven traps, but I was building a lead over the rest.

And then it looked as if it might all come crashing down. Dobrynska opened the shot put with a mighty throw of 15.81 metres. I managed only 13.07 and then a disastrous 12.55 metres. It meant that, as I stepped up for my third and last throw, a big lead had been whittled away. Deep down I knew the world title attempt probably rested on this throw. I picked up the shot, took position and tried to clear my mind. De-clutter the boxes. Chell always says the shot put is not about muscle but timing. It’s like a golf swing. Too fast or too slow and you will shank or slice it.