The same thing happens before every Olympic Games – a handful of stars from each country get singled out as medal contenders, the golden girls and guys, with their faces plastered across billboards and newspapers. And with the Paris Olympics now just weeks away, all eyes are on the world heptathlon champion Katarina Johnson-Thompson.
Taking things one step further, a 30-metre by 10-metre mural of 31-year-old Johnson-Thompson, hurdling on the sports track, has landed in her hometown of Liverpool.
The mural, which was commissioned by British Gas, took local artist Paul Curtis took three weeks to complete – and aims to drive positive change through sport.
WH grabbed 10 minutes with the World Champ for a quick Q&A to find out how she’s feeling ahead of Paris – and what the celebratory mural means to her.
WH: Paris is going to be your fourth Olympic games, how different does it feel going into these games than London – which was over a decade ago now?
KJT: It’s been 12 years since I first competed on the Olympic stage in London 2012. It was my first senior international. The first time I completed in a crowd of more than 3,000 people. There were 80,000 people in the stadium, so I was definitely a deer in headlights.
I’ve obviously been to two other Olympic games since then – and I feel like I’m in a completely different place each time. Four years come along, and I feel like I’ve been changing each Olympic cycle. I feel really ready for this next one.
When I think back to the last four Olympics – London was the first one and I was just buzzing to be there. I had no pressure whatsoever.
I was still quite young at Rio – I was 23 years old – but I had the pressure of the world on my shoulders unnecessarily. I feel like my mind let me down there and I put more pressure on myself than I needed to.
Then, in Toyko, my body let me down. I had one of the biggest injuries of my career, which meant I had to take eight months out of training.
WH: Your calf injury at the Tokyo Olympics forced you to sadly quit after day one. Since then, there’s been a lot of speculation about your health – just a few weeks ago, you withdrew from the European Championships in Rome due to a minor leg injury – how are you feeling in your body right now?
KJT: I feel like I’ve learned a lesson from each of the Olympics I’ve competed in and I’m going into Paris feeling strong – both physically and mentally. I just hope that I can pull out the performance I know I’m capable of.
WH: We all know you’re such a strong athlete – just last summer you won your second world title at the World Champs in Budapest – how are you finding the pressure to perform?
KJT: I don’t think Budapest put any extra pressure on me really. Since Tokyo, I’ve been fighting to be the athlete I thought that I lost along with the injury. Budapest showed me that I don’t have to be that athlete from the past. I’m a new, different athlete now – I’ve been through a lot of hard stuff which I’ve learned from. I think the past has helped strengthen me – because I’ve gone through it – and it’s helped me mentally attack Paris, I’ve got nothing really to lose.
A lot of people have been saying that I have unfinished business with the Olympics, but I don’t feel like that at all. I feel like I’ve already achieved a lot. And I feel very lucky that I’ve achieved so much because a lot of athletes are so capable but then just get unlucky with injury or unlucky with opportunity. So I feel grateful and glad that I can compete.
WH: Do you have any pre-race rituals that you find help to ease your nerves?
KJT: For me to feel good on the day, it’s years and years of preparation. I need to prepare myself so I feel like I haven’t left any stone unturned. The Olympics are months in the making, so for me to feel competent on race day, I need to feel like I couldn’t have done anything more to prepare myself in training.
I don’t feel like any special ritual will be able to fix not training. So as long as I prepared in the months leading up to it as best as I can, and I’ve been honest with myself and I’ve tried to progress every single day – that’s what gives me the most confidence.
WH: Do you ever listen to music to get you in the zone ahead of a race?
KJT: Beyonce. There are two songs I tend to listen to. Heated from her Renaissance album. And Blackbird – which is a slower pace but iconic – is the song that I start to warm up with, when you’re still kind of calm and you want motivation.
WH: What would gold at Paris mean to you?
KJT: It would mean the world to me. The Olympics are the pinnacle of most track and field athletes' careers. It would mean the absolute world – and I have to be truthful about that – but it’s not the be-all and end-all because I’m really happy with the career I’ve had.
WH: What are you most looking forward to about racing in Paris?
KJT: Paris is very close to home. I spent a lot of my time there after I finished the Rio Olympics in 2016. I've lived and trained in Montpellier for five years, right up until Tokyo. So Paris is a place I used to pop to every now and again on the weekend.
It’s got some of my favourite restaurants and favourite coffee shops – so I was looking forward to going to some of those. But then I saw the timetable, and I’m on at the very end, so I’m not sure I’ll have time to go to any of the places I’ve got bookmarked on my Google Maps. I’ll have to save those for a holiday later on as I’m just going to be living in the Olympic Village.
WH: What’s your go-to post-race meal?
KJT: For me, it’s a pizza and a big glass of wine.
WH: Out of the seven events in Heptathlon, which is your favourite – and why?
KJT: My favourite is the high jump. That’s the event that I started with – it’s the event I did before I did the heptathlon. It’s one of the best feelings when it’s going well – how high can you get over this bar – and it’s a crazy event, you basically run towards something and jump over the top backwards. And you have to have a certain mindset – when you see something that you haven’t jumped before and you’ve just got to attack it and do your best.
WH: There's a mural being commissioned in your hometown of Liverpool with motivational phrases from the public – what's the one word or phrase you find motivates you the most?
KJT: I think ‘progress not perfection’ is definitely something that I live by religiously, especially being a heptathlete – not everything goes perfectly to plan. On the day, just as long as you’re progressing and doing what you can on each given day or each and every event, that’s all you can do and you will have absolutely no regrets after that. So I think, from the mural, that’s something that’s hit home and I’m going to take into Paris with me.
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With nearly a decade of journalistic experience – in print, online and social – at national newspapers and lifestyle magazines, it’s fair to say Alice has tried it all when it comes to health and fitness. From packing herself off to an extreme Aveduric retreat in Sri Lanka and sweat-testing every new fitness fad to running the London Marathon and completing a 70.3 IronMan, Alice now looks after WH’s food content. With a ‘food first’ ethos, she is here to help you decipher exactly which foods will support your health, and which macro-counting, pasta-replacing, intermittent-fasting, 13-day cleanse is just, well, a scam. A keen baker and host, her favourite dessert has to be pavlova (with lots of summer berries and whipped cream, of course).
