Dame Jessica Ennis-Hill (née Ennis; born 28 January 1986) is a British retired athlete who specialised in the heptathlon and 100 metres hurdles. As a competitor in heptathlon, she is the 2012 Olympic champion, a three-time world champion (2009, 2011, 2015), and the 2010 European champion. She is also the 2010 World Indoor pentathlon champion. A member of the City of Sheffield & Dearne athletic club, she is a former British national record holder for the heptathlon. She is also a former British record holder in the 100 metres hurdles, the high jump and the indoor pentathlon.
Since retiring from athletic competition, Ennis-Hill has appeared as an athletics commentator and studio pundit for the BBC. She has also worked as an entrepreneur and created several fitness apps specialising in women's health and training.
Born in Sheffield on 28 January 1986, Ennis-Hill is one of two daughters of Vinnie Ennis and Alison Powell. She has a younger sister, Carmel. Her father is a Jamaican self-employed painter and decorator, who was born in Linstead in the parish of St. Catherine and migrated to Sheffield, England at 13 years old. Her English mother is a social worker from Derbyshire. Her father did some sprinting at school, whilst her mother favoured the high jump.
They introduced her to athletics by taking her to a Start:Track event at the Don Valley Stadium during the 1996 school summer holidays. She won her first athletics prize, a pair of trainers. There she met Toni Minichiello, who was to become her coach.
Ennis-Hill took to the sport immediately and joined the City of Sheffield and Dearne Athletic Club the following year, at the age of 11. In November 2000, at the age of 14, she won the Sheffield Federation for School Sports Whitham Award for the best performance by a Sheffield athlete at the National Schools Championships, where she won the high jump competition. Growing up in the Highfield area of Sheffield, Ennis attended Sharrow Primary School and King Ecgbert School in Dore, where she took her GCSEs and moved on to the sixth form, where she studied three A-Levels, before going on to study psychology at the University of Sheffield, graduating in 2007 with a 2:2.
Ennis's full-time coach throughout her career was UK Athletics national coach for combined events Antonio 'Toni' Minichiello, who coached her since she was eleven years old. She also received specialist javelin coaching from World Championships bronze medallist and European Championships silver medallist Mick Hill.
Ennis took part in athletics from a young age. She competed in the high jump and pentathlon at the English Schools AAA Junior Girls in 1999, and was 2nd with a PB score, she then won the AAA Girls title in the high jump the following year at the age of fourteen, clearing 1.70 metres. In 2000, she won the Sheffield Federation for School Sports Whitham Award. In 2001, she was runner-up at the high jump and heptathlon events in the English Schools AAA Intermediate section and won the high jump in 2002 with a jump of 1.80 metres. Ennis established herself as one of Britain's top junior athletes at the AAA U20 Championships in 2003 as she took the indoor pentathlon title and outdoor 100 m hurdles title.
Ennis competed at the 2003 World Youth Championships in Sherbrooke, Quebec, Canada in July, where after leading at the end of the first day she finished in fifth position with 5,311 points.
The following year Ennis competed in the 2004 World Junior Championships in Grosseto, Italy, where she finished eighth with 5,542 points, again after leading at the end of the first day. Ennis won two silver medals, in the 100 m hurdles and the high jump, at the 2004 Commonwealth Youth Games in Bendigo, Australia, held in November and December 2004, and won the heptathlon at the July 2005 European Athletics Junior Championships in Kaunas, Lithuania, with a British junior record score of 5,891 points. She was the first Briton to win the heptathlon title.
One of Ennis's first victories as a senior came in February 2004, when she was eighteen years old. She won the 60 m hurdles at the Northern Senior Indoor Championships in a time of 8.60 seconds. Two weeks earlier she had won three Northern Junior Indoor Championship titles: the 60 m sprint, the 60 m hurdles and the high jump. Also in February Ennis finished third in the 60 m hurdles at the AAA Indoor Championships in Sheffield in a time of 8.43 seconds. At the July 2005 AAA Championships Ennis competed in the 100 m hurdles, in which she recorded a personal best time of 13.26 seconds, and the high jump.
Ennis's first senior international competition was the 2005 Universiade, held in August in İzmir, Turkey, where she won a bronze medal in the heptathlon with a new personal best of 5,910 points, behind winner Lyudmila Blonska and second-placed Simeone Oberer.
2006: First senior competition medal
Ennis won a bronze medal for England at the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, Australia with a personal best score of 6,269 points, improving her previous best total by more than 350 points. Her high jump of 1.91 metres would have been enough to take the individual event gold medal. She achieved personal bests in the high jump, the 200 m and the javelin. Before the competition her aim was merely to score over 6,000 points. The competition was won by Kelly Sotherton with 6,396 points, with Kylie Wheeler second on 6,298 points.
At the AAA Championships in July, Ennis competed in the 100 m hurdles, in which she recorded a personal best time of 13.19 seconds in the heats, and the high jump. In July, Ennis guided the Great Britain women's team to a fourth-place finish in the overall competition at the European Cup Combined Events Super League competition in Arles, France with a combined points total of 17,454. Ennis finished fourth in the individual standings with a points total of 6,170.
Later in 2006 Ennis improved her personal best with a score of 6,287 points when finishing eighth at the 2006 European Championships in Gothenburg, Sweden. Ennis produced personal bests in the shot put, the 200 m and the javelin. The medallists were Carolina Klüft (6,740 points), Karin Ruckstuhl (6,423 points) and Lilli Schwarzkopf (6,420 points).
2007: World Championships breakthrough
In January, Ennis set a new personal best of 8.24 seconds in the 60 m hurdles at the Loughborough indoor meeting, whilst in February, at the UK Indoor City Challenge Cup in Sheffield, she set personal bests of 7.43 seconds in the 60 m and 6.19 metres in the long jump.
Ennis finished sixth in the pentathlon at the European Indoor Championships, in Birmingham, improving her personal best score by more than 300 points to 4,716. In May she broke the British under-23 heptathlon record, set by Denise Lewis in 1994, by winning in Desenzano, Italy, with a score of 6,388 points. In doing so Ennis equalled the British high jump record of 1.95 metres and recorded personal bests in the 100 metres hurdles (13.12 seconds) and the long jump (6.40 metres).