Jessica Ennis-Hill

Posted July 13, 201212 yr

Jessica Ennis, MBE (born 28 January 1986 in Sheffield) is a British track and field athlete specialising in multi-eventing disciplines and 100m hurdles. A member of the City of Sheffield Athletic Club, she is the former European and world heptathlon champion and the former world indoor pentathlon champion. She is the current British national record holder for both the heptathlon and the indoor pentathlon.

Background

One of two daughters born to Vinnie Ennis and Alison Powell, Jessica Ennis has a younger sister called Carmel. Her father, originally from Jamaica, is a self-employed painter and decorator; her mother, a social worker, was born in Derbyshire. Neither of her parents was particularly athletic, but 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 Sheffield's Don Valley Stadium during the 1996 school summer holidays. In later years she joked that her parents took her to the event because "I think my mum and dad wanted me out of the house!" She won her first athletics prize there – a pair of trainers. More importantly, it was there that she met the man who was to become her coach, Toni Minichiello. She took to the sport immediately and joined the City of Sheffield Athletic Club the following year, aged eleven. In November 2000, aged fourteen, 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 sat her GCSEs and stayed on in the sixth form to gain three A-Levels, before going on to study Psychology at the University of Sheffield, graduating in 2007 with a 2:2.

Ennis lives in Sheffield with her chocolate Labrador Myla. She got engaged to long-term boyfriend Andy Hill on Christmas Eve 2010. She is a fan of Sheffield United.

She writes a column for The Times newspaper and is a patron for businessman Barrie Wells's sports foundation. Ennis is also an Ambassador for the Jaguar Academy of Sport. She has been involved in advertising campaigns for Aviva, Powerade, BP, Adidas, Omega watches and Olay 'Essentials', and was featured on the cover of the August 2012 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine.