Jessica Ennis-Hill

Athlete and Olympic Heptathlon Champion

Ennis-Hill is the current Olympic champion and British record-holder in
the heptathlon and has qualified for the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio,
less than a year after giving birth to her son Reggie. She’s a highly
visible, likeable and inspiring role model – and she took a principled
stand when her local football club, Sheffield United, was considering 
re-hiring convicted rapist Ched Evans on his release from prison. Her
first political statement, it was hugely brave and proved a turning point
in the controversy.
Jessica Ennis-Hill is a retired English track and field athlete. Born and
brought up in Sheffield, Yorkshire, England, she started training in
athletics very early in her life. She developed her very own hurdle-
overcoming technique, as a 10-year-old child, and that feat separated her
from rest of athletes of her age. At the age of 14, she ended up winning
the ‘National Schools Championship’ and proved that she was destined
for a bright career in the world of athletics. Her performance improved
significantly, when she started her training in heptathlon. She won the
gold medal at the 2012 ‘Olympics’, apart from winning the 2010
‘European Championship,’ and acing the ‘World Championships’ thrice.
She currently holds the British national record for heptathlon, and has
broken many records in high jump, 100-meter hurdles, and indoor
pentathlon. Her achievements earned her the ‘BBC Sports Personality of
the Year Lifetime Achievement Award’ in 2017. Hence, she became the
first British woman, and the second woman in the world, to be honored
with the award, which is considered as one of the top-most awards in the
world of sports.
Throughout the next few years, she kept receiving honors for several
national and international organizations and kept inspiring young
females to take up athletics. She mostly stayed away from sports in
2014, owing to injuries and her pregnancy.
By 2016, her performance had somehow dimmed. She tried defending
her gold medal in the 2016 ‘Rio Olympics,’ but failed to do so. She won
the silver medal, and a few months later, in October 2016, she
announced her retirement from the world of athletics to concentrate
more on her family and health.
She was honored with the ‘Dame Commander of the Order of the British
Empire’ in the year 2017, for her contribution to athletics in the country.
The 30-year-old, who won silver at the Rio Olympics this summer, has
always projected a healthy body image, not only for other athletes but
for young girls and women.
While we're all in awe of her incredible abs (the result of hard graft)
she's never been tempted to strip off and flaunt it all, instead leaving her
achievements to do the talking.
She's become the poster girl for a nation, which is still battling an
obesity crisis, by making athletics cool again. And she still trains in her
home city of Sheffield, where she lives with her husband Andy and their
son Reggie.
Jess is real and although she makes it look easy, she's always been
honest about the impact her strenuous regime has on her body and her
family life, expressing that she's felt guilty when she's had to leave her
young son.
She could have easily fibbed that getting her six-pack back after
pregnancy was effortless, but she even admitted at one point that she
was close to quitting and questioned herself in the lead-up to her
comeback. It's reassuring to know that even Olympic champions doubt
themselves.
She was already a sporting heroine in my eyes, but in the summer of
2015, her comeback year after giving birth to son Reggie, she went on to
win gold at the Beijing World Championships.
It reiterated how dedicated she was to a sport she's been passionate about
since she was a young girl, as well as juggling motherhood with her
training .