大象传媒

Dame Jessica Ennis-Hill is one of the most successful and influential women in British sporting history. She's a European, Olympic and three-times World heptathlon champion, most memorably winning her Olympic gold medal in London in 2012. In 2017 she became the second woman (and the first British woman) to win the 大象传媒 Sports Personality of the Year Lifetime Achievement Award. This is what we learned from her Desert Island Discs:

1. Jessica wants us to think about the years of training as well as the medals and glory

“It's just always been something that stuck with me,” Jessica says. “I want to be remembered for those moments of hard work on the track that no one saw; those years of dedication and sacrifice that you make as a sports person, and not just for those amazing key moments that you have, but for everything that takes you on that journey to that final point.”

Jessica has won more international medals than any other heptathlete.

2. Her memories of the 2012 Olympics are still very powerful

“Gosh, every time I speak about it, it still gives me goosebumps. It makes me well up with this feeling of excitement and a big smile on my face instantly,” says Jessica. “It was one of those moments that you dream of, that you've worked so hard towards, and you think to yourself: ‘Will it actually ever happen? Will it come true? Will it happen for me as an athlete in my lifetime?’”

“And those two days were the most intense, stressful, competitive - physically and mentally - draining days of my life. But to bring them together and to finish on the podium, was the most amazing feeling I'd experienced at that point.”

On ‘Super Saturday’, when Britain won six Olympic golds in a single day at the 2012 games, Jessica won the gold medal in the heptathlon with a British and Commonwealth record score of 6,955 points. Among her other records that day, her time in the 100 metres hurdles was a new British record and also the fastest time ever run in a heptathlon.

3. Jessica’s first music choice is one of her favourite motivational songs

“This is the track that I'd always go to when I was either training and feeling tired, and motivation was wavering a little bit, I’d put the song on, and it would just lift me and give me that confidence that I needed to go out there and really push hard on a training session,” explains Jessica. “Or it'd be that song that I'd listen to before I stepped out onto the track, just before I'd come off the warm-up track about to enter the stadium. I'd listened to this song to give me a huge amount of confidence and self belief.”

The song is Nicki Minaj’s Moment 4 Life, which includes the lines “I fly with the stars in the skies, I am no longer trying to survive”, moving on to “I get what I desire, it's my empire, And yes, I call the shots, I am the umpire, I sprinkle holy water upon a vampire…”

4. Jessica says she and her mother are ‘very different’ people - with one significant exception

When Jessica’s mum was young “she was a little bit of a rebel. At that time she dyed her hair pink, which my grandparents love to tell me about. She was a little bit off the charts. I'm the complete opposite. I'm very - rules, straight, do things properly.”

But Jessica admits that she got her drive and focus from her mother: “My mum has always been very competitive with anything like I am. So whether it's – 'I’ve cooked a pizza, it's got to be the best pizza that you've ever tasted' or I'm feeling a bit ill then it’s 'I'm the illest today'… I'm the same so yeah, I definitely think I've inherited that from my mum.”

5. One of her discs brings back strong childhood food memories - and they’re not good!

“As soon as I hear it,” says Jessica, “it brings back memories of being at home with my sister, and one specific memory of my dad cooking tripe for me, which still to this day makes me want to be sick. I remember him cooking it up in the kitchen with onions and this song was on. So it really just kind of brings back that memory.” Happy times - except for the tripe!

The song is Street Life by Randy Crawford.

6. Her first interest in athletics was partly sparked by the chance to win some trainers

“My mum and dad took me and my sister down to Don Valley Stadium, which was the track in Sheffield at the time,” says Jessica. “It was a summer camp that they had on I think pretty much every year. It was two weeks of ‘Come down to the track and try every event’... At the end of the two weeks you could win a pair of trainers. And for me that was like pure excitement, being able to win something and come out on top, and just be the best and I think that's what definitely hooked me from the start.”

7. A heartbreaking injury forced her to approach one of her events in a new way

In 2008 Jessica suffered stress fractures in her right foot while competing. The realisation that she’d miss that year’s Olympics, she tells Lauren “... was, honestly, probably one of the worst moments of my career. I just felt so, so broken, so heartbroken. I thought that this was going to be my first Olympics, I was so excited, so ready to do it. And then in an instant, it was just taken away from me.”

“It was my right foot,” says Jessica. “So I take off with my right foot for the high jump, and for the long jump, but you can imagine the forces, the load that goes through that individual foot is huge. So once I started to recover from that injury, to do my rehab and build back into full training, my coach [Toni Minichiello, Jessica’s coach since she was 13] then said to me, ‘Right, I've got an idea - we're going to change take off legs for the long jump, and you're going to start jumping off your left leg now!’ And I was: ‘What do you mean? I've jumped off this leg [for] my whole life.’”

“For anyone that doesn't know the long jump that well, it's a big ask because you train one side of your body and one specific way... I had to build up strength in a different way that I'd never done on that side, I had to learn all the technique of how you kind of fly through the air in the long jump on the other side. It was so, so hard because the coordination in itself is a huge challenge.”

In Jessica’s first event after the injury she recorded her best ever score.

8. She remembers hearing one of her discs at two key and very different moments in her life

“When I stepped out onto the track at the London 2012 Olympics, this was playing in the stadium just before I went out to do the 800 metres... and it's just always kind of stuck in my mind. And then I remember having my daughter, Liv, and going through a long labour. Then just as she was about to be born, the radio was on in the hospital, and this song came on and it just gave me that last little drive to meet her for the first time. So this song has a real special part in my heart.”

The song is Unfinished Sympathy by Massive Attack.

9. Jessica doesn’t see the Olympic win in 2012 as her greatest professional achievement

“Although London 2012 was incredible in every sense of the word,” explains Jessica, “Coming back after having Reggie [her first child born in 2014] and being able to get myself back to fitness, and becoming a mother for the first time and everything that comes with that - I was just so overwhelmed and so proud that I was able to come back to the world stage that year after - and win the World Championships again, and then win silver at the Rio Olympics. It was by far my proudest moment.”