Jessica Ennis: Unbelievable - From My Childhood Dreams to Winning Olympic Gold (14 page)

I felt distraught but managed to smile and congratulate her. To be fair, she was in amazing shape and had put everything together. Her tally of 6880 points topped anything I’d ever done. But going on that lap of honour with the other girls was one of the hardest things I’d ever done, because I just wanted to go and lock myself behind a closed door and be miserable.

The press guys asked Chell whether I would come back. ‘I think she already has,’ he said. ‘It would have been very easy for her to sit here and take silver and go home, but she put it all on the line. I respect her a lot for that.’ He knew how much it hurt, though, and was not about to pretend this year did not matter because of 2012. ‘That’s pretty much rubbish. I’m sure Alex Ferguson doesn’t say, “I want to lose the Premier League this year and win it next year when it’s more important.”’

He was right. I gave some interviews and said that it was not about this year, that it was all about 2012, but they were just words. It kills you. In the official press conference one journalist asked how it felt to have lost the title and had my winning streak ended. It hit home. I said something to the media but I was on autopilot. More words, as empty as I felt. Then I went back and cried my eyes out.

I
am dying on the floor in Sheffield. Another lung-busting, leg-sapping 800 metres is behind me. I feel empty. Chell stands over me and is talking away. Something snaps. I summon up some breath and shout: ‘Do I look like I can bloody talk!’

Everybody has upped their game this year. Everybody is tense. We are pretending it is the same as any other season, but it isn’t. The closer it gets, the more it affects me. TV adverts are playing with my face on. Andy pauses them and makes a joke. I cringe. This is my one opportunity. My one shot. It is scary.

As much as I felt honoured to be talked of as the ‘Face of the Games’ I didn’t ask for or apply for the title. A journalist asks me what the process is of signing up for the title, as if it is something official. I found it a little uncomfortable as I don’t have an ego and I say it was the media who decided it. I am bit embarrassed and feel there are any number of faces of the Games. However, I did not reject the tag and enjoyed a lot of the sponsor and media stuff I did, I wanted people to know my name, but it is pressure. More pressure. Rising all the time.

And so I snap. Sometimes I storm off and cry in the toilets at the EIS when I don’t feel that the session has gone well. I don’t let Chell see that and normally save it until I go home. Sometimes I go and sit in the car and stew. One day I start up the engine and drive to Leeds for my physio session with Ali. Chell knows he has overstepped the mark and keeps ringing, but I refuse to answer. That time he comes up to Leeds. I do not want to talk about it.

I know that he sometimes thinks I am whingeing. When we started out I trusted him because he was older and knew everything. But, as the years go by, your own knowledge gets deeper and you realize that this is a massive part of your life and you have to take some responsibility too. You’re not a puppet. You can’t rely wholly on other people any more. If things go wrong I need to know why. If we are doing a 200 metres session at this time of the year I need to know the reason. He finds the questioning hard, but I am not trying to be disrespectful. Nevertheless, he finds it offensive and sometimes storms off himself and I am just left there on my own. Pressure rising. Sometimes I think, with injuries, he feels things are out of his control. He gets angry and says we will pull out of this or that. We both fly off the handle. It is a weird relationship. It’s a business partnership but closer than that. And, beneath all the snapping and tears, the huffing and puffing, and beneath all that pressure, it works.

The build-up to London had started at the end of 2011. I had sat in a coffee shop across from the athletes’ village in Daegu and pushed my silver medal around the Formica table. I said it was a medal to cherish but it wasn’t what I’d wanted. Mo Farah had had another chance and got a gold in the 5,000 metres, but I had no opportunity to make amends. I’d keep the medal with all my others. They are in a box in my house. I don’t have anything on display. I don’t have photographs of me hanging on the walls. My mum keeps all the cuttings but I pile them in a corner of the office and maybe one day will get round to looking at them.

We normally do a five-week block of training at the start of a new year and then Chell gives us a series of tests to do to gauge where we are against previous years. This time he gave us only three weeks. I was mad again.

‘Why are you testing us so early?’

‘I just want to get a baseline of where we are,’ he said.

‘But I don’t want to test now. I haven’t done enough.’

He got his way. There were around fourteen of us in the group for 2012. I saw Hannah, my friend and former training partner, and she said, jokingly, I deserved a medal just for putting up with Chell for so long.

‘Say that again and I will squirt you in the face with this bottle,’ I said after more harsh words.

He did and so I unleashed my bottle all over him and then ran off. He chased me but the training had obviously paid off because he could not catch me. There was always humour mixed with rage.

Sometimes it is hard at the EIS. It is a public space and so there are a lot of kids who come down to do their school sport. They get there at 9 a.m. and gradually it gets louder and louder. We usually booked the back straight and toiled away as privately as we could, but it was not easy. It was lovely to see the kids enjoying themselves, but sometimes it was difficult to strike the balance. Teachers would ask me to go over and say hello and, while I was happy to, sometimes I’d be asked to give a ten-minute speech when I should have been training. I found it hard to say no and occasionally the teachers would ask a bit much. Then I’d be in the middle of a nightmare long-jump session and I would hear the kids all shouting: ‘JESS-I-CA, JESS-I-CA, JESS-I-CA!’

I figured that it was good practice for the Olympics, having people scrutinize you when things were going badly.

I had never trained as hard as I did that winter. Chell says he wrote out a training plan, with bells and whistles and a cherry on top, and then ripped it up. He called it the Olympic disease, the urge to try too hard. Instead, he said I should be training at between 96 and 100 per cent of my maximum effort in training. It did not have to be all flat out. The key then was to raise that lower band so that I was training at a higher level. Every year he wanted to move training on 5 per cent so I would run harder and faster and do three weights sessions instead of two, followed by 150 sit-ups and more over-distance running work.

The attention was becoming harder too. At one point in 2012 a woman came up to Sheffield purporting to be a journalist with
The Times
. Then she said she was from another newspaper. She began bugging my aunty and uncle and then pitched up on Dad’s doorstep at 8 a.m. one day asking for an interview. Dad said I should talk to Jane and do it the proper way. The woman would not go away, though, and then ambushed my grandma and said she was writing an article about strong women. It was all a cover and she was just looking for some dirt. My family kept it from me until after the Olympics and I was glad because that would have really upset me and made me worried. This is my stuff and I don’t want it affecting my family. Jane had warned me to expect it in Olympic year and I knew people would be sniffing around for a story. Although we had nothing to hide, no family is perfect.

In February things escalated when diver Tom Daley’s coach accused him of doing too much media and promotional work. A few journalists tried to jump on the bandwagon and drag me into it. That really annoyed me because I had never missed training. I did work for my sponsors on my one day off. People who had no idea about me said I should be resting then, but I liked it and it was an outlet. These people also forget that we do not get paid ridiculous amounts of money like footballers, and we make most of our income through commercial deals. You get Lottery funding, which is means-tested, but I was not really getting paid to run until I’d become a world champion. There just isn’t the appearance money on the way up. I realized then that people were after negative stuff and wanted to put a spin on the truth.

My first indoor competitions of the year were in Sheffield in January. I did the shot put at the Northern Championships, a modest loosener of 13.95 metres, and then did the long jump and 60 metres hurdles at the McCain Indoor City Challenge three weeks later, clocking 6.19 metres and 8.05 seconds respectively. The year was built around three dates. The first would be the World Indoor Championships in Istanbul in March, where I would be defending my title, the second was a return to Götzis in May and the third was Friday 3 August, the start of the Olympic heptathlon. That was journey’s end.

The trials for the World Indoors were also on home turf at the EIS in Sheffield in February. I twice matched my personal best of 7.95 seconds in the 60 metres hurdles and claimed the national titles for that event and the high jump, where I reached 1.91 metres. It was a good start. ‘Promising,’ I said in a press conference, but I knew that everybody was going to be in top shape for Olympic year. Being as good as before was not going to be enough. A week later, on 18 February, I went to the Aviva Grand Prix and clocked 7.87 metres, a big personal best for the hurdles, the fastest time in the year and one that saw me take the scalp of Danielle Carruthers, the American specialist who had been runner-up in the solo event in Daegu. It put me in good spirits as I headed to Instanbul.

My grandad always rang me before major competitions. He had been there at the start, waiting impatiently at Don Valley as another coaching session with Chell overran by 45 minutes or so. My family and I have a reputation for always being early, so our contrasting approach to timekeeping was another testing area for me and Chell. Before Turkey Grandad rang me and gave me his advice.

‘Relax,’ was a regular mantra. ‘Stay focused on your technique.’

‘All right, Grandad.’

After Daegu, he rang and said: ‘I’ve been having a think about your javelin.’

Everybody had. The press were talking of it as if it was a huge problem and a major weakness. If I had matched my personal best then I would have actually won the world title by a single point, and I thought it was just a blip. Mick had felt terrible about it because it was the only event he was coaching, but it was not his fault. I never felt that way, but as soon as I got back he rang me up and said we needed to meet at the EIS, and he came along with reams of paper and notes about what we were going to work on. He was so frustrated, but I had just written it off as one of those things. Sometimes it just doesn’t happen. There doesn’t always have to be a major flaw. I had missed a lot of training and it had gone wrong. Simple as that. We made a slight change to my run-up because we had not been as consistent with it as normal in 2011 and we made a few minor tweaks to my technique.

There would be no javelin in Istanbul for the indoor pentathlon at the World Indoor Championships. The javelin and the 200 metres are the events that are not included in the five-event competition. I felt fantastic after my start to the year and knew I was running better than ever. It was so refreshing to go into a championship with a clean block of training and no injury scares.

I went to the pre-event press conference with Mo, Charles van Commenee and Tiffany Porter, who had been made the team captain. I had been asked but said I would rather not, because I just did not feel I wanted any extra distractions as I prepared for London. They asked Tiffany and, at the press conference, a journalist asked her to recite the National Anthem. It was really uncomfortable. I think naming Tiffany as the captain put her in an awkward situation because it opened her up to be questioned about the whole ‘plastic Brit’ thing. It was hard on her.

Everyone was aware of the talk in the media, but there was no divide in the team. I was directly affected by it because I really wanted the British hurdles record and Tiffany came in and took it straightaway. I was frustrated but she had a passport and it was all legit. It was not something I could control so I did not worry about it. Tiffany is a really nice girl and I thought it must have been hard coming into an established team and trying to be part of that, so I tried to be as welcoming as possible.

The arena was on the outskirts of Istanbul, away from the hustle and bustle of the chaotic centre and the boats bobbing up and down the Bosporus. I saw the other girls and there were some nods and hellos. For Dobrynska it was going to be a particularly tough event because her husband – who was also her coach – was at home in the Ukraine where he was seriously ill with cancer. Chernova, meanwhile, was the world champion and had already scythed a huge amount off her best time in the hurdles in the build-up.

I was in lane five for the hurdles with Dobrynska outside me. The indoor event is so quick that there is no margin for error. A mistake and you are done for. The gun sounded and 7.91 seconds later I had won the race. Chernova and Dobrynska were second and third.

The pentathlon takes place on one day, instead of two, so there was not long to wait until the high jump. I jump from the left side off my right foot with most of the girls jumping off their left foot from the right side. That meant that I was in the minority when I turned up to the high-jump area and saw a bright yellow contraption close to where I would take off. It was distracting. Chell had clocked it and was shouting down to me from the stands to get it moved. I asked an official, but he said they couldn’t do anything. It was in line with the finish of the sprint straight and held the beam that measured times.

There was nothing I could do so I just got on with it. I sailed over the first few heights but hit problems at 1.87 metres. I got over that at the last attempt, but could not manage 1.90 metres, which was frustrating given that I had already jumped it that season.