Katarina Johnson-Thompson rolls up her black Nike parachute pants and presents her left ankle for inspection. It’s a warm May afternoon and we’re sunning ourselves on the red rubber-crumb track at Loughborough University, where she trains six times a week. There’s a three-inch scar on her Achilles tendon, which she ruptured in 2020. Hovering just above it is a tattoo of the Blue Shell, a menace known to any Mario Kart player as a homing projectile that targets the lead racer, stopping them on impact. “In Tokyo, I was in the lead and then the Blue Shell came and absolutely took me out,” she says in her soft Scouse tone, her laugh punctuated with a hint of incredulity.
It’s typical of KJT, as she’s known to her friends and fans, to see the funny side of what many predicted would be a career-ending injury for the now 31-year-old heptathlete. But then resilience is her USP. During her extraordinary return at the 2020 Tokyo Games, after months of intensive rehab on her ankle, she was in fifth place when she tore her calf in the 200m. “I think it’s really hard to be a fan of me,” she says, grinning, of her dramatic career. “It’s not an easy ride!”
No one who watched the 2012 London Olympics will forget the record-breaking British heptathlete Jessica Ennis-Hill – nor KJT, the smiley, fresh-faced 19-year-old with a staccato mouthful of a name, making her senior debut in her slipstream. (Her bio on X still reads: “Chronically indecisive so I’ve adopted two surnames & the heptathlon.”) She was “shitting a brick” when she walked out in front of the 80,000-strong home crowd and eventually finished 13th, but a spark had been lit. “That was the first time I realised: OK, this is what athletics is all about,” she recalls. That September, she abandoned a Liverpool John Moores University sports science degree after two weeks (“I’ve had colds that lasted longer”) to go pro.
At the 2015 World Championships, Johnson-Thompson was gunning for gold, only 80 points behind Ennis-Hill, when she fouled three long jump attempts, finishing 28th and sobbing on live television. She came back from a quad tear and knee surgery to compete at Rio 2016, but her throwing let her down. Then, in 2019, she won the World Championships in Doha with a British record of 6,981 points, surpassing Ennis-Hill’s previous record of 6,955. One year later, “My Achilles came apart in two places,” she says. “Roller-coaster” doesn’t touch the sides.
A lithe 6ft tall exactly, with a shy demeanour that soon warms up, today she’s dressed in black, with box-fresh sneakers from Nike’s retro Bode collaboration. Right now, KJT is feeling happy and healthy, ready to begin her outdoor season off the back of another stunning return to form: she clinched her first world title in four years at the World Athletics Championships in Budapest in August 2023. She describes the win as “so much sweeter” given that she wasn’t expected to medal. “It is maybe my favourite moment of my career,” she says, beaming at the memory, but then adding, “and I went to a Beyoncé concert – I know I sound mental, but she looked at me and I dropped my phone. When I think of last summer, I don’t even think of Budapest sometimes, I just think of the Renaissance tour.”
And now comes a summer when she will once again compete for the only major hardware that has eluded her: an Olympic medal at the 2024 Paris Games. Jessica Ennis-Hill believes she can go all the way. “She’s at a stage now where she’s really assured of herself, she knows the event so well, she’s been through every possible scenario of things that can happen – things that can go well and go wrong – and she’s got all that in her armour,” she says. “It’s never plain sailing, [but] I think Kat has got, seriously, a fantastic opportunity of really contending for that gold medal.” A nation that has spent more than a decade crossing its fingers for this most elegant and emotional of athletes – KJT admits she “hasn’t got a poker face” – will be hoping she finally gets her flowers. “I just want a chance,” she says. “I want to get to the start line in good shape. And I want to be able to then commit to whatever cues work out for me on the day.”
Johnson-Thompson was born in 1993 in Woolton, one of Liverpool’s leafier suburbs, famous as the resting place of Eleanor Rigby, who may or may not have inspired The Beatles song. Her English mother, Tracey Johnson, met her Bahamian father, Ricardo Thompson, in a hotel in Nassau; she was touring with the Bluebell Girls dance troupe and he was working as a bellboy. They married and settled in the Bahamas, but the marriage broke up. After Johnson-Thompson and her mother returned to Liverpool, she saw her father occasionally (he died in 2017), but Tracey is her rock. “We didn’t really have very much but I wouldn’t notice that, the way that she brought me up,” she remembers.
As a child she was always dressed in her beloved Liverpool football kit, though her mother had her in dance shoes as soon as she could walk. After ballet lessons every Saturday, she would race home, redo her hair in plaits “like Spinelli from Recess”, pull on her Steven Gerrard shirt (her all-time favourite player) and head outside to play football with the boys. She lived this double life until she was eight or nine, when a school friend spotted her mid-demi-plié. “I froze when I saw them,” she recalls, mortified. “I never went back.” Tracey insisted she take up another hobby. She tried keyboard lessons, ice skating, football, but nothing stuck. Then, when she was 11, she broke her primary school’s 29-year-strong high jump record, clocking 1.32m. When a school rival joined the Liverpool Harriers & Athletics Club, she begged her mum to let her join too.
Reaching 6ft by the time she was 15, KJT was a wunderkind all-rounder who took multiple junior titles. But high jump was always her thing. She has considered making it her sole event: in 2016 she clocked a British record, clearing 1.98m while competing in the heptathlon at the Rio Olympics, a score that would have seen her take gold in the individual competition, though she ended up coming sixth. “I was so tempted,” she recalls, of paring back her events, “but I didn’t like the idea of giving up on something, you know? I think I’m just stubborn.”
Few disciplines are more consuming than the heptathlon. Combining seven events over two days, it begins with 100m hurdles, high jump, shot put and a 200m. Day two comprises the long jump, javelin and 800m run. Competitors earn points for their multifaceted magnificence; the athlete with the highest points tally wins. (For context, the reigning Olympic champion, Belgian Nafi Thiam, scored 6,791 in Tokyo; only four women have ever passed the mythical 7,000 mark.) Two-time Olympic gold medallist Thiam, whom Johnson-Thompson acknowledges as “one of the all-time greats”, is the woman to beat this summer, alongside the American hotshot Anna Hall and Dutch supremo Anouk Vetter. But, she insists, “I feel like anyone can take it if they just turn up on the day and they’re in the right mindset.”
The key to winning, Johnson-Thompson believes, is to be “adaptable”. She has applied shock therapy to her career several times: in 2017 she left her coach of eight years, split up with her boyfriend and moved to Montpellier to recalibrate. Two years ago she switched coach again, taking up with the athletics veteran Aston Moore, who has doubled down on her weaker throwing events and instilled in her a sense of calm. “Even if I open up bad, it’s a puzzle that we can figure out. It takes the pressure off me, because there’s always something we can change,” she says. Her “never-give-up attitude” is fuelled, she says, by “that sort of grit that people from Liverpool have”. Kevin Mayer, the French world record holder in the decathlon, who trained alongside KJT in Montpellier, says her mindset is “unique”. “She has an incredible physical capacity,” he says via email, “and with this never-back-down mindset, it’s an awesome combination.” She’s learnt the hard way to stay “in the moment”. “I’ve been through a lot and I’m really quite mentally strong,” she says, smiling.
The world has shifted too. I ask if she still feels that Black athletes, in particular, face double standards, one bad result between nation’s sweetheart and pariah, a tightrope act she touched on in an article for Vogue in 2020. “I feel like athletics is definitely more open to understanding the struggles that we’re all going through,” she says now. She credits the gymnast Simone Biles – who withdrew from the Tokyo Olympics citing mental health concerns, later speaking out against a culture of physical and mental abuse – with shifting the dial. “Overwhelmingly, it’s been a positive response,” she says. But race has already proved a hot-button issue for Paris 2024, when a rumour that Aya Nakamura, the most listened to French-speaking artist, would perform at the Opening Ceremony saw the Black musician met with a wave of racist abuse.
She’s been unpicking her own past recently for her upcoming memoir, Unbroken. In particular: teenage anxiety around body image, when she used to stand on the sofa to gaze at herself wearing athletics knickers and a crop top in her mum’s overmantel mirror. She recalls: “I got myself into a really negative headspace. Being in elite sport, you don’t see puppy fat and I was still a teenager – I still had the chubby cheeks. After the body fat thing, I went through a phase when I was scared to be too muscly. You’re comparing yourself to women who are at the top of their game and you’re like, ‘I don’t look like that.’” It’s taken six years, but now she doesn’t care what she looks like, “as long as it’s useful for my performance”.
Films, books, football, music, walking her two dachshunds, Chorizo and Bronx, and hanging out with her boyfriend, the British hurdler Andrew Pozzi, help keep her occupied off the track. She’s read 22 of the 52 novels she’s aiming to read this year, rating Maud Ventura’s My Husband and Akwaeke Emezi’s Freshwater. Last night she watched All of Us Strangers, the 2023 drama starring Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott. She loves Scott, whom she clocked with Phoebe Waller-Bridge at the 2023 GQ Men of the Year Awards and fan-girled from afar. Surely Jodie Comer, one of her best childhood friends – the pair went to St Julie’s Catholic High School together – who starred in Waller-Bridge’s Killing Eve, could have introduced them? “Me and Jodie are in two different worlds!” she says, giggling. “Any time I’m with Jodie, I don’t even think about people looking at me – I’m protective of her, almost.” Even at 13, she says, it was obvious Comer was a star. She saw her on stage in London last year, in Suzie Miller’s play Prima Facie, and was blown away. “She is insanely talented,” she says.
Last weekend, she went back to Liverpool to “pay her respects” to outgoing Liverpool FC manager Jürgen Klopp. She’s rented a crashpad in Loughborough for the past two years, but Johnson-Thompson’s “forever home” is a Georgian townhouse she purchased in Liverpool in 2018. She swipes through the original Zoopla listing on her iPhone, laughing as she shows me the dated swags and velvet décor. She’s been slowly renovating and converted a wardrobe into storage for her vast shoe collection. “I’m so easily influenced,” she says sheepishly, reeling off The Row, Bottega Veneta and Maison Margiela as catering to her size-nine-in-spikes feet. “If I see something and it’s got Apple Pay, I buy it instantly.”
She thinks she might open a karaoke bar in Liverpool when she eventually retires (Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart” is her go-to). That or a book-cum-coffee-shop. Or a boarding kennels for dachshunds. “When my mum came to Rio, she put them in a place called the Sausage Dog Hotel near London. I was like, ‘This needs to be taken to the north!’” She thinks she’ll have a family eventually, but wants to take a year out after she retires. “My life, for as long as I can remember, has been train, schedule, peak condition,” she says. “I want to have a long time when I’m just doing my own thing.”
But first: Paris. Her pre-heptathlon ritual will begin with watching Kill Bill: Volume 1 and 2 back to back the night before. When she crossed the Budapest finish line in 2023 as world champion, she says, “I understood the emotions that [the Bride] felt when she was in the bathroom after she completed killing everyone!” It’s a ruthlessness she’ll be harnessing at the Stade de France – and one that feels even more vital when, several weeks after our interview, in June, she’s forced to drop out of the European Championships in Rome with an injury niggle (“After some treatment and a little bit of rest, I was straight back to training,” she later emails. “There’s more work to do but I know I’m heading in the right direction, making progress and excited for the start of the Olympics.”)
Back at the track, though, Johnson-Thompson is quick to stress that this Olympics – her fourth – won’t define her. “I do feel that everyone is rooting for me, because they’ve seen the traumatic things, but I want to reclaim the image of myself,” she says, smiling. She waves away suggestions this will be her last Olympics. “I struggled in 2022, thinking that I was past my best. Now I’m feeling like I’m at my best because of all the experiences that I’ve had. I feel like I can go on.”
As for her legacy, she says: “I’ve had a great career and I’ve won all these medals. It’s not always been about injury, failure. No matter what happens in Paris, I am really happy with my story.”
Hair: Amidat Giwa. Make-up: Lauren Reynolds. Nails: Sabrina Gayle. Set design: Louis Simonon. Production: The Curated. With thanks to Lee Valley Athletics Centre