Jess Ennis profile

Jessica Ennis: The face of London 2012

Jessica Ennis may be the face of London 2012 but she is also the most grounded world-class athlete it is possible to imagine.

She still turns out to compete for the athletics club she joined at 13. She still lives and trains in Sheffield, where she was born and brought up. She still has the same coach she had when she was a teenager.

She is also engaged to Andy Hill, a Sheffield lad she met when she was at school.

Ennis was born in 1986. Neither of her parents - decorator Vinnie Ennis and social worker Alison Powell - were particularly good athletes but, when both of them were working in the 1996 summer holidays, they sent Ennis and her younger sister, Carmel, to a sports camp at the Don Valley Stadium.

She was ten-years-old at the time and a pupil at Sheffield's Sharrow Primary School.

This, she says, is where she caught the bug. She also met her coach, Toni Minichiello, for the first time and he remains the mastermind behind her career.

Rise

Ennis joined the City of Sheffield Athletics Club and became heavily involved in sport at King Ecgberts Secondary School, in the Dore area of Sheffield.

By the time she was 14 she was competing in the English Schools Championship when she came 15th in the high jump. A year later she won the event.

In her late teens she rose steadily through the ranks of junior athletics, spurred on by heptathlete Denise Lewis's gold medal in the Sydney Olympics in 2000.

However, she did not neglect her studies, getting three A levels and then a psychology degree from Sheffield University.

In 2006 she won a bronze medal at the Melbourne Commonwealth Games, including a high jump mark which would have won her gold in that event.

A year later she broke Denise Lewis's under-23 British record for the heptathlon by scoring 6,388 at a meeting in Italy.

Low-point

In 2008, Ennis suffered heart-break when she found out she broke her right ankle two months before the start of the Beijing Olympics.

Yet she went from this low point to the peak of her career in 12 months when she won the gold medal at the World Championships in Berlin, with a new lifetime best of 6,731 points, in August 2009.

This victory saw Ennis's public profile rocket overnight. She was suddenly the golden girl of British athletics.

Her home city greeted her with a civic reception. Later in the year, she came third in the BBC Sports Personality of the Year, behind Ryan Giggs and Jenson Button.

She was also named Sportswoman of the Year by the British Sports Journalists' Association.

MBE

A year later, Ennis won the pentathlon gold at the World Indoor Championships in Doha and gold in the heptathlon at the European Championships in Barcelona.

In 2011, Ennis was appointed an MBE and earlier this year she finally broke Denise Lewis's British record when she scored 6,906 at a meeting in Gotzis.

Anyone who has ever come in contact with Ennis will agree that while Olympic glory will push her even further into the celebrity stratosphere, it will not go to her head.

Ennis will return to Sheffield - to her parents, her sister, her club, her coach, her fiancé and her chocolate Labrador, Myla, and carry on as normal.