Jackie Joyner-Kersee

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Women's athletics
Olympic medalist
Jackie Joyner-Kersee
Medal record
Gold	1988 Seoul	Heptathlon
Gold	1988 Seoul	Long Jump
Gold	1992 Barcelona	Heptathlon
Silver	1984 Los Angeles	Heptathlon
Bronze	1996 Atlanta	Long Jump

Jackie Joyner-Kersee (born March 3, 1962) is a retired American athlete, ranked amongst the all-time greatest heptathletes. She won three gold, one silver and one bronze Olympic medals. Named after Jackie Kennedy, she currently lives in East St. Louis, Illinois.

Joyner-Kersee was the first woman to score 7,000 points in a heptathlon event (during the 1986 Goodwill Games). She was inspired to compete in multi-discipline events after seeing a 1975 television movie about "Babe" Didrikson.

As of August 2006, Joyner-Kersee holds the world record in heptathlon along with six all time best results and her long jump record of 7.49 m is second on the long jump all time list. In addition to heptathlon and long jump, she was a world class athlete in 100 m hurdles and 200 meters being as of June 2006 in top 60 all time in those events.

Jacqueline Joyner was born in East St. Louis, Illinois, and went to UCLA, where she starred in both track and basketball. She is the sister-in-law of the late Florence Griffith Joyner. Her brother, Al Joyner, is also an Olympic gold medalist, having won the Olympic triple jump in 1984. Sports Illustrated voted her the greatest female athlete of the 20th century. In 1986, she received the James E. Sullivan Award as the top amateur heptathlete in the United States. She also has a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame.

Along with the sudden death of her sister-in-law in 1998, Joyner-Kersee endured other great tragedies as a young child. When she was 11, she saw a man get killed. A few years later, she called her grandmother to talk, only to find out her grandmother too, had been killed. Also, when she was a freshman at UCLA, she suddenly had to return home when her 37-year-old mother contracted a rare form of meningitis. By the time she arrived, her mother was in a coma and brain dead. Since her father could not bring himself to have life support removed from his wife, it fell to Jackie and Al to authorize removal, which they did.

Perhaps her greatest challenge, however, was physical. She suffers from exercise-induced asthma, and on more than one occasion had to be hospitalized following an event.

[edit] See also

Featured Athlete on Fox Sports Net's Beyond the Glory

[edit] External links

Olympic champions in women's pentathlon and heptathlon
As pentathlon: 1964: Irina Press \| 1968: Ingrid Becker \| 1972: Mary Peters \| 1976: Siegrun Siegl \| 1980: Nadezhda Tkachenko
As heptathlon: 1984: Glynis Nunn \| 1988: Jackie Joyner-Kersee \| 1992: Jackie Joyner-Kersee\| 1996: Ghada Shouaa \| 2000: Denise Lewis \| 2004: Carolina Klüft

Olympic champions in women's long jump
1948: Olga Gyarmati \| 1952: Yvette Williams \| 1956: Elżbieta Krzesińska \| 1960: Vera Krepkina \| 1964: Mary Rand \| 1968: Viorica Viscopoleanu \| 1972: Heide Rosendahl \| 1976: Angela Voigt \| 1980: Tatyana Kolpakova \| 1984: Anişoara Cuşmir-Stanciu \| 1988: Jackie Joyner-Kersee \| 1992: Heike Drechsler \| 1996: Chioma Ajunwa \| 2000: Heike Drechsler \| 2004: Tatyana Lebedeva