Jessica Ennis: Unbelievable - From My Childhood Dreams to Winning Olympic Gold (16 page)

As London approached, the demands from the sponsors and media grew. It was another time that I felt I had to be firm. Sponsors wanted me to go down to the Olympic Stadium for shoots, but I refused all of them. The reason was I wanted it to be new and fresh when I got there. I wanted that adrenaline buzz. I wanted to see the stadium when it was full of people rather than an empty arena. I had been there once, when it was still a building site and there was no track down, but the next time I went there I wanted to get that rush of newness.

There were other offers too that I felt strongly about. A local BBC film crew wanted to follow me up to the Olympics. I didn’t want to do it. Chell was keen and said it was not about me, it was about him. I got annoyed. I didn’t mean it arrogantly, but I said: ‘It’s not about you, is it? It’s me running that they will be filming.’ I was strongly against the idea, but Chell let the guy come. I had nothing against the people involved – they were lovely – but it was not something I needed. One day Chell asked if they could go and film an interview with my mum and dad. I didn’t want that either. My mum has done a few things, but they are private people and don’t like being in the spotlight.

‘Why don’t they go and film your mum if it’s all about you?’ I asked him. He shrugged and walked off.

As London got nearer, though, Chell and I were communicating well. We were in this together, thirteen years of joy and pain coming down to these two days in Stratford. Sometimes Chell would be concerned I was doing too much and would tell me to take an afternoon off. I would refuse that too. If I missed an afternoon for anything then I would wonder where we were going to make it up.

There were two weeks between Oslo and the Olympic trials which doubled as the UK Championships. I threw the javelin and did the long jump in Bedford in the interim and then went to the Alexander Stadium in Birmingham for the trials, which were being held from Friday 12 July to Sunday 14 July. Unlike many competing that weekend, my place in the team had already been decided. I also knew that Louise Hazel and Katarina Johnson-Thompson would be my heptathlon team-mates. Kat was only nineteen and had produced a string of personal bests to get the qualifying standard while I was in Oslo. She is certainly the star of the future and has already beaten my junior records. I was pleased for her.

However, the trials were still important for me and the first day was mixed. I won the hurdles but struggled in the high jump. The warm-up for the latter was seriously shocking and I failed to clear any height. I was panicking a bit and went over to Chell.

‘What’s wrong? What’s wrong?’

I could see in his face that he was worried. He looked a bit lost. He will hate me for saying this, but he told me I could pull out, that I didn’t need to go through with it. I am not sure why he said it. I don’t know if he was worried I’d embarrass myself or if he didn’t want me to get beaten so close to the Olympics. Maybe it was reverse psychology or just a desire for me not to worry about having a poor jump next to my name. But I said I couldn’t pull out. If things went badly at the Olympics I’d have to deal with that. It would be a bad habit to get into and I’m not a quitter. The competition started and I cleared every height up to 1.89 metres at the first attempt. I took the UK title and mocked Chell.

‘Pull out, eh? Didn’t have faith, did you?’

But the warm-up and the inconsistency had been unnerving. I couldn’t put my finger on it, but reasoned that I should go back to basics. Sometimes you don’t run the curve well and forget to lean away from the bar. So I thought, ‘Don’t overcomplicate it, run a good curve and lean.’ That’s what had given me my personal best of 1.95 metres back in 2007.

The next day was worse. The long jump was still a problem. At Bedford I had done four fouls before getting in one decent jump of 6.40 metres. The grey clouds in Birmingham hovered over me as I started the competition in front of the main stand. It became an exercise in frustration. I lost my rhythm on the runway and then found myself having to speed up on the board. Then I was over the board. My position was all wrong and so I was fouling or pulling out of jumps and running through the pit with a look of deepening exasperation. In total, it meant that from my last twelve jumps in two competitions I had done seven fouls and two run-throughs. It was scarcely ideal preparation for London, but time was running out. My brain was wrecking.

When things go wrong I want to see Chell straightaway. I want to repair the damage instantly. He was upbeat, saying we could put it right, but I knew we were running out of time. It was one month until the start of the Olympics and I was in tatters.

I
am on the balcony of our hotel room at Club Quinta da Ria. It is another beautiful day, light blue skies reflected in the pool. It would be an idyllic scene but for the black mood festering away. I have just had the worst long-jump session I could have imagined. Every effort was a no-jump. There is a fortnight to go. Nicola Sanders, my room-mate, is in when I get back and so I move out to the balcony. I ring Andy and pour out my heart and fears. I can’t do it. I’m going to mess it all up in the long jump. What if all this work is for nothing?

The saving grace was that before going to the Team GB holding camp in Monte Gordo, Portugal, I had done some good sessions with Chell and Bricey.

‘Don’t worry, we can sort this out,’ Bricey said. We filmed every jump and then analysed it in slow-mo. Bricey went away to crunch the numbers, returning to tell me how much vertical lift I was getting. Then we decided to take the run-up back a bit. We had to try everything after the disaster in Birmingham.

I had stopped reading the newspapers or watching the news. I did not trawl the Internet or spend much time on Twitter. You really do not want to be reading something bad on there so close to the Games. I was in lock-down. I didn’t want to talk about the Olympics. Before flying to Portugal I held a baby shower for my friend Charlotte at my house. It was good to see friends and catch up with normal life. I rarely like to go on about the Olympics. If anything, my friend Katie is the one who gets a bit excited and says how wonderful and amazing my achievements are, and complains that I don’t tell her everything. But that’s Katie and I love her to bits for it. I said my goodbyes to my friends and family and flew to Portugal. It would be three weeks until I saw Andy again, by which time it would all be over. As ever, Grandad told me to relax and and stay focused on my technique.

There was a relaxed atmosphere in Portugal and I liked sharing with Nicola. We usually talked more about
Grey’s Anatomy
than the Olympics. We often watched it on our laptops. Earlier on in the year I had thought we were at the same stage and so mentioned a main character dying.

‘What!’ she cried.

‘Oh, er, well, he might not have.’

A day later she saw him coughing up blood and so I was well and truly rumbled. The look she gave me could have killed.

Most things were going well. I had some great hurdles sessions and felt confident in that. Hurdling can be scary. The key for me is in bringing your lead leg down before you have actually cleared the hurdle with your trailing leg, thereby reducing your time over the hurdles. That is quite a daunting thing to do because your instinct wants you to clear it comfortably. Get it a fraction out and you will clatter a hurdle and there is a fine line between a fast time and falling. I remembered back to the last Olympics when Lolo Jones, the American, had the gold medal in the bag in the 100 metres hurdles. She was clear and almost home. Almost. Six letters but a huge word. She hit the penultimate hurdle and dropped way back. Her one shot was a blank. I knew my lead leg was a bit straight. It always had been but the sessions were good and I was confident. The same went for the 800 metres. I had a good time-trial in the scorching heat on the Algarve and knew that boded well for the cooler climes of London. Everything was going well. Everything except the cursed long jump.

I was glad that we were in Portugal. I could imagine how mad everything was going at home and was happy that UKA had decided long ago that we would be basing ourselves out here in relative anonymity, rather than in Aldershot, which had been the original plan and where it would have been far harder to shield us from the hype.

There had been talk about getting the likes of Cathy Freeman and Michael Johnson, the Australian and American Olympic legends, to talk to us about the pressure of a home Games. I was not too bothered. I respected their achievements, but felt I was on my own path. And, anyway, I was looking forward to a big crowd.

On the night of the Opening Ceremony, the team gathered in the hotel’s auditorium. It felt like an age since there had been a public debate about how the athletes were being denied the chance to go to the ceremony. I certainly didn’t feel that way. The ceremonies and countdowns were more for the public. The athletes were going to the Olympics to do a job.

We wore the same garish gold and white tracksuits worn by those athletes who did make the ceremony. We had the BBC on and the presenter said it would only be another forty minutes before Team GB came in, but the athletes’ parade seemed to drag on forever. My parents had gone to the ceremony and Mum texted me. ‘There are a lot of people here,’ she said. That made me laugh. She later said that she was worried because of the noise and thought of me being in front of 80,000 people, but I thrive on pressure and didn’t think that was going to be a problem. Then Jessica Zelinka, one of the other heptathletes who had arrived in London, sent me a message. ‘It’s like a Jessica Ennis theme park,’ she tweeted. I laughed at that, but did begin to think, ‘Oh my God.’

We had the team speeches while we were in Portugal. Charles van Commenee liked to make jokes, but sometimes they got lost. The theme of his speech was journeys. He looked at Greg Rutherford, the long jumper, and called him ‘the man of glass’ because he said he was always injured. Little did we know what he’d go on to achieve. Then he mentioned many other athletes with positive and slightly negative statements. By the time he labelled Nigel Levine ‘the Joker’, Nicola got the giggles and I had to look down and try to stop going the same way. Nobody else was making a sound. Charles continued, talking of the challenges he faced, even mentioning ‘Fatgate’, but then got interrupted. A mainstay of his speeches was some light-hearted banter directed at the hard-to-decipher Scandinavian accent of Aki Salo, who worked with the relay team. This time Fuzz Ahmed, the RADA-trained coach of high jumper Robbie Grabarz, hijacked the speech and a video of Aki came up on the screen. However, the perfectly clipped vowels of Lawrence Clarke, an Old Etonian hurdler and heir apparent to a baronetcy, had been dubbed over Aki’s words. That brought the house down.

The 400 metres hurdles world champion, Dai Greene was expected to do very well in London. His captain’s speech was more natural than mine and included a sly dig at me because I kept saying to him, ‘how’s your speech going,’ and winding him up – his praise of the juniors in the team including the suggestion that Kat could give me some long-jump lessons. There was a good atmosphere that night, but the reality was now dawning on us. The Olympics, the goal that had always seemed so far away, was here. This was our time. Would I capture the moment or let it slip?

I had never competed in London before, not even at Crystal Palace, the UK’s biggest track meet. It was a new experience for me. I was just glad that we had flown to City Airport and not Heathrow, where BA had painted my face over an area the size of fifteen tennis courts in a field. This was a welcome for arriving athletes and was used to boast on Twitter about the menace of #home-advantage. I had thought it was on private land when I was told about the idea, but then I found out it was just a field. I expected a bunch of kids to go out there armed with spray cans and spades. Things had certainly taken a turn for the weird.

The Olympic Village was an assault on the senses. From the calm and quiet of Portugal, we were plunged into this swirling mass of noise and colour. From the enormous dining hall to the armed police, it was daunting and overwhelming. We went to check our rooms. They were basic but fine, and I was sharing an apartment with a great bunch – Nicola, Goldie Sayers, Lee McConnell, Yammy Aldama, Kate Dennison and Eilidh Child.

Sometimes it is easy to stay in your bubble and forget what everyone else is going through, but I felt so sorry for Goldie, one of the nicest people you could wish to meet. She had been in great form and had broken the British record at Crystal Palace before flying out to the training camp. However, she had also suffered a serious injury in London. She said she could throw but then the pain was excruciating. She had to give it a go, but she was a victim of the worst possible timing. I was gutted for her.

Phillips Idowu was another who was struggling with injury. He had been the world champion in the triple jump in 2009 and had a habit of producing his best on the biggest stage. However, he had decided to stay in London and receive treatment there rather than fly out to Portugal. It became a story, fuelled by the fact he did not see eye to eye with Charles. In London people began to speculate whether he would turn up or not. Charles even called him ‘the invisible man’, but I just thought it was really sad because he obviously had an injury and was trying to deal with it the best way he could. Like Goldie, it would be awful for him that he just did not have enough time to get it right.

For the main part, though, I was taking in the new surroundings. We had barely dumped our bags when Nicola spied Prince William and Kate Middleton coming into the village. We dropped our bags, ran down the stairs and strategically positioned ourselves where they could not miss us.

‘Oh, hi Jess,’ said William.

I thought, this is getting weirder still. Then Kate asked us about the village before Prince Harry piped up.

‘Not much pressure on you, then.’

The dining hall was so big that you would always look for someone else to go with. It was like being back at school again, a scrawny child standing with a tray in the canteen trying to find a friendly face to sit with. The rooms were basic but good, somewhere, I imagine, between prison and halls of residence, but I would hardly be there because I was always one of the first to leave and last back. Usually, I am quite conscientious and tiptoe around if I am sharing. This time I was glad to have my own room. The only thing that was disconcerting was when I had a quick look on Twitter and a found a twenty-year-old boy, who was on the cleaning staff, had declared excitably that he had just been in Jessica Ennis’s room. That freaked me out a bit.