Jackie Joyner-Kersee

Jacqueline Joyner was born on 3 March 1962 in East St. Louis, Illinois, and named after First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, with her grandmother reportedly predicting she would one day become 'the first lady of something.' She began competing in track and field as a child despite growing up in significant poverty, and attended UCLA on a basketball scholarship before focusing on the multi-event heptathlon and long jump under coach Bob Kersee, whom she later married.

Joyner-Kersee competed in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, narrowly missing heptathlon gold by a fraction of a point, before dominating the event at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, where she won gold in both the heptathlon, setting a world record that remains unbroken decades later, and the long jump, becoming one of the very few athletes to win Olympic gold in both a multi-event discipline and an individual field event at the same Games.

Joyner-Kersee's 1988 heptathlon score of 7,291 points remains the standing world record more than three decades later, a testament to the exceptional, sustained combination of speed, strength, technique and endurance the seven-discipline event demands, and her achievement is widely regarded by sports historians and analysts as one of the most dominant single-competition performances in track and field history.

Joyner-Kersee continued Olympic competition across four consecutive Games from 1984 to 1996, winning a total of six Olympic medals across her career, including three golds, and continued setting and holding numerous American and world records across her events throughout an unusually long and sustained period of elite competitive excellence.

Joyner-Kersee has managed asthma throughout her competitive career and life, a health condition she has spoken about publicly to raise awareness that the condition need not limit elite athletic achievement, and has been an active philanthropist and community advocate, establishing the Jackie Joyner-Kersee Foundation supporting youth sports, education and community development programmes in her hometown of East St. Louis.

Joyner-Kersee received the Sports Illustrated Female Athlete of the Century honour in 1999, and remains widely regarded as the greatest female athlete of the 20th century by numerous sports historians and publications, her 1988 heptathlon world record standing as one of track and field's most enduringly unmatched achievements, a benchmark against which subsequent multi-event athletes continue to be measured decades after she set it.