Jessica Ennis: Unbelievable - From My Childhood Dreams to Winning Olympic Gold by Jessica Ennis

and removed the champagne bottle that had stood on top of my fridge for a year. It had been given to me when I missed the Olympics, by Joe Rafferty, who worked for Adidas. I read the message written on it for the last time
    Open this when you are world champion in 2009
    and then I popped the cork.

7
REIGNING IN SPAIN
    S port has a habit of giving with one hand and clobbering you with the other. I started 2010 in the form of my life but then felt a problem in my foot. I mentioned it to Chell.
    ‘I don’t mean to worry you but I’ve got a pain,’ I told him.
    His face dropped. Then he dropped everything else and we had it checked out straightaway. This time I went for an MRI scan in Leeds and found that there was a slight strain on the ligament that runs around the side of the foot. It was my right foot, what you might term the wrong foot.
    The doctor told me the bones were fine, but the frustration wasn’t. I had worked hard during the winter and felt I was in the form of my life. In various events, I had achieved eight personal bests in a month, as well as a British indoor record in the 60 metres hurdles. In that race I beat Lolo Jones, the almost untouchable world indoor hurdles champion, in Glasgow. It is always satisfying to beat the specialists. Combined eventers are sometimes referred to as jacks of all trades, so it is nice to go against specialists and show we can be competitive. I had attempted the British high jump record in Glasgow too and think that may have been where the problem started. The next day it felt a bit tight, but I went on to have a really good week of training and was running good times. The tightness lingered, though, and now that I had a history, I knew I should have it checked out.
    As a result I missed the trials for the World Indoor Championships and the Aviva Grand Prix event in Birmingham, but I did make it to the World Indoor Championships, which were held in March 2010 in Doha, Qatar – in the combined events, athletes are picked on form or past performances and so trials are never ‘sudden death’. I found it an odd place and, even though we were indoors, the dry heat was awful. I was up against Hyleas Fountain, who had not been at the World Championships, and Dobrysnka was back in top form, so with another batch of training ruined by the foot problem, I had plenty of doubts going into the pentathlon.
    However, it could scarcely have gone any better. I ended up 86 points clear of Dobrynska, broke Carolina Klüft’s championship record and was four seconds short of breaking the eighteen-year-old world record of Irina Belova, which some say is tainted given that she failed a drug test the year after.
    I was ecstatic to have backed up my performance in Berlin, and I told reporters, ‘I’ve beaten them all now, here or in Berlin, and that’s the nicest thing – to come back this year and prove I’m not a one-hit wonder.’
    Chell likes to talk to the press and said people were making the ‘extraordinary ordinary’ by expecting a world record that ‘Klüft had several bashes at and didn’t achieve.’ He was defensive like that, but I was just relieved because I hadn’t done nearly as much as I had wanted to in training and had blown up in an 800 metres time-trial just before leaving.
    The only downside to Qatar was that I was so dehydrated that I spent five hours trying to give a sample in doping. The only other girl in there was a hurdler. She was there when I went in and there when I left. She might still be there now. Chell sat with me for a bit, then Jane came in. It was boring and frustrating because all I wanted to do was celebrate.
    It was around then that Charles van Commenee started saying he wanted me to move down to London. Lee Valley was going to be one of the national high performance centres and he felt that would be better for me to be based there. I could not understand that. I had won the world title and everything was working perfectly. Moving to London