Jessica Ennis: Unbelievable - From My Childhood Dreams to Winning Olympic Gold

by Jessica Ennis

  Mum had a friend called Michelle when we were little. She had two children, Libby and Eddie. Libby was Carmel’s age and Eddie was two years older than me. We did a lot together as Mum was a firm believer in wearing out your children, so there would be lots of trips to the country in Michelle’s undersized Fiat Panda, kids on knees, no seat belts, picnic in the back. I hated the walking, but I was six and hopelessly in love with Eddie.

  He had long blond hair and was as cute as they come. ‘We’ll get married one day,’ I’d think as we held hands. I have a vivid memory of writing lots of Valentine’s Day cards to him, but then hiding them away and never sending them, undone by shyness.

  My closest girlfriend was Charlotte. We met at infants and remained best friends through school, university, sport and adulthood. I would follow her around and do whatever she wanted to do. ‘Don’t be a sheep,’ my mum would tell me, but I ignored her and joined the brass band, playing the trombone, not through any great love of music, but because Charlotte played the cornet. I also had a close friend, Lorna. Both of us had a fixation with the film The Bodyguard, and especially Whitney Houston. I was about twelve years old when I decided I would cut my hair like hers, so I began to hack away. The results were devastating, an uneven mess that was more like a crew cut. It was the worst hairstyle I’d had since I had a Mohican as a baby and Mum had to spend ages trying to make it right and consoling me.

  In 1993 my parents sent me to Sharrow Junior School. In terms of academic results it was not the best, but Mum was keen for me to go somewhere that had a rich mix of races and cultures. I think she felt that was more important in those formative years. I now think that was a shrewd decision, because children can be unforgiving about differences, picking them out and using them as sticks to beat you with. I knew that because I was still the smallest in the class and I became more self-conscious about it as the years went by. Swimming was a particular ordeal, and in my mind now, I can still see this young, timid wisp standing by the side of a pool in her red swimming costume quaking with anxiety.

  I was small and scraggy and that was when the bullying started. There were two girls who were really nasty to me. They did not hit me, but bullying can take on many forms and the abuse and name-calling hurt. The saying about sticks and stones breaking bones but words never hurting falls on deaf ears when you are a schoolkid in the throes of a verbal beating. At that age, girls can be almost paralysed by their self-consciousness, so each nasty little word cut deep wounds. I went home, cried and wrote in my diary. Perhaps it would be nice to say that one day I fought back and beat the bullies, but I didn’t. It festered away and became a big thing in my life, leaving me wracked with fear about what they would say or do next.

  It got to the point that I dreaded seeing them at school. And then we moved onto secondary school and I found out that they were going there too. The dread got deeper. Later, I did tell my mum. ‘They are only jealous of you,’ she replied. But jealous of what? I could not understand it. I tried to deal with it myself, but that was impossible. I would rely on my diary and hope for the best, but that was not much of a defence against these scary girls who were dominating my thoughts. And then, around that time, my mum saw an advert for a summer sports camp at the Don Valley Stadium in Sheffield. It was my first taste of sport and it would be the first tentative step towards fighting back and getting my own quiet revenge on the bullies.

  2

  THE RELUCTANT ATHLETE

  I was in a hurry. What can I do now? What can I draw next? When can we go home? I hurtled through everything at breakneck speed, fuelled by impatience and boredom. It was a lot for Mum to deal with. Her work was stressful and involved a lot of emotional investment. It is the same now that she is a manager for the Turning Point charity, working with those affected by drug and alcohol addiction. She has always been a caring person, but she was at her wits’ end in the summer of 1996, so the Aviva Startrack camp was a godsend.

  I went down with my sister Carmel, and our friends Libby and Eddie. I was anxious because there seemed to be hundreds of kids there, and I sat on the cold stone steps feeling nervous and insecure. The abiding memory of that first day now is the smell of the track. It is hard to describe, but it is special – not a sweaty staleness, but something unique to athletics. I dragged it in and never forgot it. Before long I was smitten. There was a range of coaches there, and we were split into different groups and spent two weeks trying all the different events. For someone prone to a short attention span, it was varied and fun. When the sun came out and baked the infield, there were water fights and a lot of laughs. This is when I made friends with Lorna and we were both completely hooked.

  Carmel was less enthused. She sat on the steps at the Don Valley chatting to people; she didn’t really care for the activities. She was always more social than sporting and, when she came to secondary school, would try anything to get out of PE lessons. I don’t know how she managed it but she even convinced Mum to write her notes a few times to get her excused. I think it is important to stress that, while championing the merits of sport and an active lifestyle, you have to remember people are different. Not everyone likes sport. Some people hate it. Even I’m not that interested in watching it. I like doing it but I have never considered myself a sports nut and I don’t have an evangelical belief in spreading the gospel, because it is all about finding what you like and want to do.

  Carmel did not much care for school in general back then. We had gone to King Ecgbert’s School in the little village of Dore in South Sheffield. Ecgbert was reputedly the first king of England and Dore was a much posher area, so it was a step up for us. The local school had a bad reputation and has since been knocked down, so it was a choice between King Ecgbert’s and another. As far as I was concerned, there was no debate, because my good friend Charlotte was going to join her sister at King Ecgbert’s and that sealed the deal. I started in September 1997. I was still terrified on the first day. I was not a confident child and almost froze when my dad asked me to go and get the paper from the corner shop one day.

  ‘On my own?’

  Dad barely looked at me. ‘Yes, here’s the money.’

  He knew I needed to shed some of my inhibitions, but I still remember going to big school and being frightened. There were two buildings, Wessex and Mercia, separated by a changeover path, and as I was edging along it one day, I heard an older girl say: ‘Oh, look at her, she’s so tiny and cute.’ That made me feel ten times worse.

  Sport, though, was becoming an outlet for the insecurities and I found I was good at it. Mick Thompson and Andy Bull were two of the Startrack coaches who first thought there might be the semblance of some ability. They said they could just tell. You watch children running and they all do it in different ways, but some of them are fluid and natural. I won a free pair of trainers at the Startrack camp and came home enthusing about it. Grandad says that, after that, I was always asking him to time me in the garden. Andy, who went to the same school and later became my boyfriend, says he remembers me running between the Wessex and Mercia buildings, timing myself. I think he is exaggerating, but I had got the bug, and when in 1996 Mick asked me to start training at Don Valley once a week, I said yes.

  I had tried other things. Charlotte played basketball and so I gave it a go too. We played for the Sheffield Hatters junior team, but I was rubbish. I also realized that I was not cut out for team games. There was a nice sense of camaraderie and I liked the fact we were all in it together, but I much preferred being in charge of my own destiny. When things go wrong in a team, you can always shift the blame onto someone else, but I thrived on the sense of responsibility and control. Perhaps it was being the first born, but I liked athletics from the start and did not want to do anything else.

  Gradually, I became more popular. The two bullies were still there, but if I was talking to anyone going through something similar I would stress that things change quickly. It does not seem like it at the time, of course, with every week an endless agony
of groundhog days, but it soon fades. I slowly made friends and the tide turned. The same girls who had bullied me now wanted to be my friends. It was all part of that whirlpool of hormones and petty jealousies that is part of being a young girl. Now I do not think they were inherently nasty people, but I know what I have done with my life and I think I am in a better position.

  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. Ro
sie’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.