Jessica Ennis: Unbelievable - From My Childhood Dreams to Winning Olympic Gold (3 page)

Sport helped me at school. It does not always work that way and you can be classed as a sport geek, but the teachers began to make more of a fuss. One of the teachers, Malcolm Rogers, is now an athletics official and he would say things like: ‘It’s three weeks until sports day, so make sure you all support Jessica.’ By year seven, when I was eleven, the PE teachers, Chris Eccles and Rick Cotgreave, said they felt I could be something special. I was high-jumping well then, despite my size, and it was not long until I was out-jumping older boys and, naturally, they hated that; nobody likes being beaten by a girl. One boy would keep bugging me to race him. I would refuse. I was training twice a week at Don Valley now and in 1998 I joined the City of Sheffield Athletics Club. I figured that I was training on a proper track and taking it seriously, so why should I take a step down and take on some boy with a dented ego?

It probably didn’t help Carmel, though. By the time she got to secondary school, the teachers would remind her of how well I was doing. ‘Oh, so you’re Jessica Ennis’s sister, you must be good at sport.’ She had no desire to be good at it, and we found ourselves on diverging paths, but school had not been a breeze for me either. It is a stressful time because all anyone wants to do at that age is fit in. I might have been high-jumping well, but I came home in year seven with my predicted grades and they were terrible – a raft of Es. Charlotte was the sort of girl who never needed to study hard and yet she would sail through, but I realized that day that I was different. I needed to work hard to get on. Something clicked. The competitive gene emerged. I had a need to be successful at everything I did and so I started to study hard as well.

Carmel was more like Mum. She was the rebel and could be a bit naughty. She had a tough time at school, with bullying beyond anything I had suffered. I wanted to help and gave the bullies a few stern looks and harsh words, but it was hard for her. Then she fell in with a group of friends I thought were dragging her down, but the thing with Carmel was she always saw the best in people, overlooking the negatives and finding the good. Nevertheless, it got to the stage where she refused to go to school. Dad had to drive her to the school gates and watch her walk through the door. He did not know that she would just wait until he had driven off and then walk out. It was tough for everyone because, as a parent, there is only so much that you can do.

I was glad I had athletics as a focus. I had the pair of cheap trainers I had won from the Startrack camp and began focusing on the sprints. Then I did the high jump. I liked the hurdles and Mick Thompson and Andy Bull said they were surprised at how well I took to such a technical event. In those days coaches moved around the varying groups at Don Valley and so I quickly ended up with Nicola Gautier.

I was in total awe of her. She would go on to become a world champion bobsleigh driver, but she was still a heptathlete back then. She was an animal in the way she was so aggressive in her approach to the hurdles and it made me wonder if I could ever succeed. I would watch her slap her thighs, growl, and go through the tics and tones that a lot of athletes use to fire themselves up; it made me feel lots of inner doubts.

Nicola was being coached by her future husband, Toni Minichiello, a bearlike man of Italian descent, and before long I was passed onto him. It was the start of a love-hate relationship that has caused me more tears, pain and ultimately joy than I could have ever dreaded or wished for. I was thirteen and utterly intimidated by this coach with the sharp tongue and fierce reputation. He was relatively new to being a coach then and, having eked out a fairly modest career as a decathlete, was looking for athletes. I remember him coming over and speaking to Mum and before you knew it we were a team, often disunited, often bickering, but with a combined desire to be better.

It did not always show. One day I went down to the Don Valley with Lorna and there was a free-for-all tug-of-war going on in the middle. We skipped down the steps and rushed to join in. There was a lot of laughing and joking and then a deep voice bellowed down from the stand.

‘If you two are not going to come down here and train properly, then you are going to have to go.’

Toni was furious and I quivered a bit. I also thought, ‘I don’t know if I want to do this if it’s going to be this serious. It’s not the same thing I signed up to a year ago.’

It was scarcely the most glamorous of hobbies either. We went to Grimsby once for a race, sharing a car and braving monsoon-like conditions to compete in a decrepit stadium. The rain was relentless and I stood there in my oversized, bright yellow City of Sheffield T-shirt, the wind billowing against it and exaggerating its bagginess. It was grim, and Mum shivered in the shadows, no doubt shaking her head internally and wondering what on earth we were doing. But there was something inside me. I was fixated on the other girls, obsessing at how big and good they were, looking down at myself running, spidery limbs going everywhere, confidence low, but I emerged from it all wanting to do it again.

I still had a social life at that time, but juggling the two would become increasingly hard as I got better and the demands grew tougher. At first I was just one of the girls, meeting up in Sheffield city centre outside HMV and going for a McDonald’s, but Saturdays slowly became dominated by athletics.

In July 1999, when I was thirteen, I went to Bury St Edmunds for the English Schools Championships. That was a huge deal. For me, at that stage, it was like the Olympics. It entailed a six-hour coach ride with the whole South Yorkshire team and two days away from home. I was crippled with nerves on the way and then got heatstroke. I felt a bit like a fish out of water, frying in the sun and out of my comfort zone. I came tenth in the high jump with a mighty leap of 1.55 metres. Soon after, Toni, whom everyone called Chell, put me in for the English Schools pentathlon held at The Embankment athletics track in Peterborough. It was another unspectacular performance. I finished fifteenth and the record does not make pretty reading. My shot put was 6.75 metres, my long jump a mere 4.38 metres and I rounded things off with a pedestrian 800 metres completed in an agonizingly drawn-out 2 minutes 54 seconds. Part of you thinks that everything will always go right and that you will win everything. It is that resilient optimism that is more evident as a child. But you live in the moment too, and so when the moment is bad, your emotions are rawer.

Things did improve at the English Schools competitions over the next few years. The following summer, in 2000, I won the junior girls’ high-jump title with 1.70 metres. The next year I was second in the intermediate girls to Emma Perkins with a jump of 1.71. Another year on, in 2002, and I was first and Emma Perkins was second and both of us jumped 1.80 metres. Chell usually entered me for the combined events too – first the pentathlon and then the heptathlon. In 2001, I had improved to second place, finishing behind Phyllis Agbo. My shot put was up to 8.59 metres and my 800 metres was down to 2 minutes 29 seconds. Phyllis was better than me, though, and the one most people would have tipped to go on. I was second to her again in 2002, this time in the heptathlon, and our roles seemed to have been set.

When I was thirteen I suffered my first major injury, although it wasn’t on the track. A friend was hosting a fancy dress party and a group of us were getting ready at my house. My parents were out and there was plenty of banter and frivolity. I had decided to go dressed as Pippi Longstocking, the character from the children’s books who is renowned for superhuman strength and her appealing way of mocking condescending adults. I heard some boys coming past and so, as a prank, I decided to lock a couple of girls outside so that they would be embarrassed. The joke backfired when, after the routine screams, one of them, Rosie Manning, shoved the plate glass of the door. It shattered everywhere and the shards dug into me, slashing my arm. Rosie’s wrists were a mess and, amid the blood and tears and shrieks, I remember thinking with trepidation about how much trouble I was going to be in.

A neighbour took us to hospital and I felt a dark wave rushing through my body and I came close to passing out. When my parents arrived at the hospital, I was in tears. I said I was sorry about the door, but of course they did not care about that. ‘Don’t worry, don’t worry,’ my dad said. It sounds sick I know, but I had always wanted a scar, so I was quite pleased with the telltale mark that I still have on my arm. Little did I know that more serious injuries and deeper mental scars lay ahead.

I was intimidated by everyone at the track at first and it took me a few years before I stopped being scared of Chell too. He just had a very blunt way and it often made me upset. I was sensitive and he did not realize that. Sometimes he still says things and I think, ‘You can’t say that,’ but perhaps it is his way of dragging the best out of us all.

The group evolved and people gradually drifted away. It happens, especially with girls. They get to the ages of fifteen and sixteen and the temptations of teenage life seem more pleasurable than slogging your guts out on a wet and windy track while receiving barbs and brickbats. We still had a great group, though, and I became really good friends with Hannah, who was a couple of years older. It was still a difficult situation as quite a few of the girls were older and started going out a lot. There were lots of parties and my friends would get exasperated with me.

‘Oh, come on, you’re always training,’ they would say.

I was, and it was hard, but I already knew, at the age of fifteen, that I wanted to be an athlete. I had fledgling ideas of being a chef or a journalist, but deep down I knew that, for some reason, I wanted this.

‘All I want to do is be on top of the podium,’ I told my parents.

‘You will be,’ they said.

‘But when?’

‘One day. Soon.’

By the sixth form I was training every night and competing at weekends. It was relentless. I have kept my friends from school, but we were doing different things then. My friends generally had more money than me too, either because their parents would help or because they could go out and get part-time jobs, but I struggled for time and money. It was my choice to do this, but I also felt as if I was missing out.

It was around that time when Chell began calling me ‘the reluctant athlete’, and there were plenty of times when I just did not want to go training. There were other times, after more hard words had left me a crumpled wreck crying in my room, that my dad decided he was going to go down to the track and have a word with this coach.

‘Don’t,’ I said. ‘It will only make it worse.’

My parents have never really been ones to intervene. They are the antithesis of the pushy parents so prevalent around sport and schools. Chell and I would go to the English Schools competitions and be amazed at the pressure heaped on the kids by their parents. Many would scream at them and berate them if the times did not add up. It was sad to see and made you understand why so many dropped out. In fairness to Chell, he always had a long-term plan. Many coaches want the reflected glory of their athletes’ trophies and titles, but Chell was never like that. He was in it for the long haul and said that the plan was not to make me a great junior but a great senior. For someone with an impatient streak, that was hard to grasp, but I am glad that I did not have a coach or parents living out their dreams through me and driving me headlong towards burn-out.

The one time my dad did intervene was when a girl at school said something racist about me to my friend Charlotte. She told me, I told my parents, and Dad went round to the girl’s house and shouted at her on the doorstep. It probably unearthed old wounds for him, but it is the only time I have ever encountered anything like that. I never consider the colour of my parents and I was amazed when I saw on Twitter that someone had posted a message: ‘Jessica Ennis’s dad is black – I can’t believe it.’ What couldn’t they believe?

Normally, though, Dad was the sort to offer gentle shoves rather than full-blooded pushes. My grandad, Rod Powell, also played his part in teasing the reluctant athlete back into the fray. He would offer me incentives, perhaps five pounds, if I got a personal best at this competition or won there. He had been an active sportsman himself, and played football and tennis into his sixties, so he loved the fact I was doing so much, albeit that interest probably helped alienate Carmel all the more as I received both cash and attention.

But during the sixth form I did try to do everything. My parents are quite liberal and would allow me to go out as long as I was in by midnight. A couple of other friends from school, Georgina and Lauren, had parents who were much stricter and did not like them going out at all. However, one time I remember Lauren and I both sneaked out and headed to a bar. Unfortunately for me, Eddie was in the bar and he told his mum, who told mine. I was undone by my first love. Mum was mad but not crazy, fixing me with guilt-inducing eyes and saying: ‘Have you got something to tell me?’

The turning point came when I was sixteen. I went to a friend’s house party and there was a lot of alcohol. Someone spilt drinks and someone else tried to clean the carpet by pouring bleach all over it. I drank too much and crashed out. The next morning Grandad arrived, as planned, to take me to my athletics competition. I pulled the pillow over my head and tried to ignore the crushing headache. I really did not want to go, but I knew I had no choice. I got out of the house and was sick before I even got into Grandad’s car. We drove to the track at Woodburn Road in silence and I could tell how annoyed he was. I got changed and then I was sick again. I saw Chell and tried to hide my condition from him. It was a horrible feeling and I realized I could not do both now. I had to choose between athletics and a normal teenage, party-going lifestyle. It was the day I decided the sacrifice was worth it. There would be time for partying later on and I did not want to look back with regrets. From that day on I would not even go out before a big day’s training, because I knew that I would not get the maximum from the session. I swallowed my pride, walked out onto the track at Woodburn Road, somehow jumped a personal best in the high jump, and that was the end of the reluctant athlete.