Britain’s Jessica Ennis-Hill was one of the most celebrated gold medal winners at the London Olympic Games in 2012. The hope of the British nation and the talisman of the British athletics team, she was first on the track in the Olympic Stadium. Despite the enormous national pressure on her, she dominated the heptathlon and won the gold medal with a British record score of 6,955 pts, beating Lilli Schwarzkopf by 306 pts. Her time in the 100 metres hurdles was a new British record and also the fastest time ever run in a heptathlon.
She was subsequently voted European Woman’s Athlete of the Year and won the 2013 Laureus World Sportswoman of the Year Award, which she received in Rio de Janeiro.
In a stellar career, she also won World Championship gold medals in Berlin in 2009, Deagu in 2011 and Beijing in 2015, just a year after giving birth to son Reggie, and the European Championship gold medal in Barcelona in 2010.
An achilles tendon injury kept her out of the 2016 indoor season, but she returned to action at the end of May and was fit to defend her title in the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro, although she was beaten into the silver medal position by Nafissatou Thiam of Belgium. She announced her retirement in October 2016.
She was voted Britain's favourite sporting hero in a poll conducted by BBC’s Sports Relief charity in January 2016 and was awarded the BBC Sport Lifetime Achievement Award at the 2017 Sports Personality of the Year Awards.
Ennis-Hill was appointed a Dame of the British Empire in the 2017 New Year’s Honours for services to athletics.
She is married to Andrew Hill and had her second child, a daughter, Liv, in 2017. She juggles motherhood with her new business - Jennis - a health and training app and website that aims to support women to achieve greater body literacy. She works closely with local charities The Sheffield Children’s Hospital and the Weston Park Cancer Hospital.
