Anna Hall texted for guidance late on August 8, the day after the first day of the Paris Olympics’ heptathlon competition.
Joyner-Kersee, who has held the world record for the heptathlon since 1988, when she took home the first of her two Olympic gold medals in the sport, has recently taken on the role of mentor to Hall, a 23-year-old American all-rounder who currently has the fifth-place ranking in the world all-time rankings. Joyner-Kersee wished to hear Hall’s voice in order to gain a deeper understanding of her thoughts. Few people could relate to Hall’s predicament more.
my personal experience of never getting hurt before and then preparing to attend an Olympic Games… I had no one to call me,” Joyner-Kersee remarked. And I wanted to place fifth in Paris before starting to prepare for her golden moment in four years, which would be the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, when, if she’s healthy, she would be able to become the first American to win a gold medal in the heptathlon since Joyner-Kersee in 1992.
Joyner-Kersee stated, “I want her to keep believing that she has everything that it will take.”
Joyner-Kersee is not the only 1984 Olympic star who thinks Hall may win a medal when the competition is held in Los Angeles again.
Daley Thompson, the 1984 Olympic gold medallist in the decathlon, stated that Hall “can only go up from here.”
“Anna must maintain her health and, most importantly, continue to enjoy her work,” Thompson stated. “She won’t always improve her strength and speed in a straightforward manner. The higher you travel up the mountain, the longer all of it takes. She simply needs to have one or two different strategies on how to reach the top since sometimes doing a lot of things doesn’t work. She’s already really close to the summit. All you need to do is be ready to comprehend if it isn’t working.
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“She’s doing fantastically. She has only been doing it for a few years, but based on her appearance, we may assume that she is an experienced, senior athlete, but she isn’t. She will continue to gain a wealth of experiences that she will be able to apply effectively.
Having won Olympic gold in Moscow four years prior, Thompson had a wealth of experience when he arrived in Los Angeles in 1984. Both of them had strong memories of the opening ceremony in Los Angeles, with Thompson remaining in awe of the artists who used jet packs to soar through the air and Joyner-Kersee being struck by the immensity of the crowd inside the LA Memorial Coliseum, which made her realize the scale of the Games.
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But Joyner-Kersee remembered realizing “my leg is not ready” at the same opening ceremony. Over the next two days, Joyner-Kersee won a silver medal in the heptathlon despite suffering from hamstring issues. She claimed that the only other occasion in her career that she had suffered a major injury was when Joyner-Kersee won gold at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, despite “excruciating pain” from patellar tendinitis. Thompson suffered a hamstring injury just days before the race in Seoul, but he still finished fourth.
Hall’s personal best score of 6988, recorded in Götzis in 2023, is surpassed only by Larisa Nikitina (7007), Nafissatou Thiam (7013), Carolina Kluft (7032), and Joyner-Kersee (7291) in the heptathlon all-time rankings.
She won a silver medal in the heptathlon at the 2023 World Championships in Budapest just two months later. However, she was unable to build on the enthusiasm from her previous season due to a knee injury she sustained during training in January 2024 and the ensuing surgery.
Her recuperation had started by February with the hopeful goal of figuring out how to still win gold in Paris. But the next five months weren’t always easy.
At practice, I experienced pain on many days when I tried things I didn’t want to do, but the physicians told me, i When I initially tried to high jump again, I was unable to perform a single-leg hop, so I thought,In six weeks, how am I expected to jump 1.85 meters? It was undoubtedly the most difficult thing I have ever done.
It takes a particular amount of pain tolerance to compete in the combined events. Given the challenges she faced in regaining her form after surgery, Hall referred to her season-best 1.89-meter jump in the high jump, her favorite event, in Paris as “the most special thing” of her competition. After the first day, she went to bed at 1am and woke up less than five hours later to start getting ready for the second day. She finished the final discipline with the quickest time in the competition, running the 800m in 2:04.39.
Joyner-Kersee remarked, “You can tell she loves performing when you see her out there.” “Despite her suffering, she would never talk about how much anguish she has experienced and still endures now. She is offering everything she has when you see her. I would never even attempt to go two minutes, two flat. That’s grit and determination.
