‘Mum wanted me to dance... but I was just a tomboy’
following summer after injury saw her fall from second. After parting with coach Mike Holmes following Rio, her life changed when the Woolton-born star chose to rediscover herself in the south of France under the guidance of Bertrand Valcin, and in the same group as France’s Kevin Mayer, who is now the world’s No1 decathlete. In a roundabout way, France was always going to be her destination because her mum Tracey used to be a dancer with the legendary Bluebells girls of the Lido nightclub on the Champsown Elysees in Paris. “Mum travelled all over the world and she wanted me to dance when I was younger,” says JohnsonThompson, 25. “But I was too much of a tomboy.” Does she dance now? “No, not very often,” she says. Her best moves are saved for the track and field where on the Gold Coast in April she won the first senior heptathlon title of her career at the Commonwealth Games.
But her worst time was the summer of 2015 and those three fouls in the long jump, the last by the smallest of margins, before the injury agony of Rio. She did not even go back to her bed after those World Championships.
“I went to my mum’s in Beijing itself,” she says. “My room-mate was competing the next day and I didn’t want to ruin her preparations. You just have to stick to the path and put it down to sport. Things come around, nothing is certain in athletics and you have to hope for the best.
“Different people deal with them in different ways. I don’t think of them going into major champs, I think of them going into training when it is difficult instead. Going into training, it definitely helps me.”
Making the move to France was a bold step for this homebody, who will face Belgium’s Olympic and world champion Nafi Thiam and Germany’s Carolin Schafer at next month’s European Championships in Berlin.
“I have always lived in Liverpool, two minutes away from family at all times, so for me it was a big move. It was very difficult but I am settled in,” says JohnsonThompson. “I don’t mind
It was a big move but I’m settled in France
so much being on my own, but when you cannot understand things, when you don’t know the language and you have to order things and speak to people in shops in broken English and French, it is tough and you do feel alone.
“But it is all part of the process. When I first went there, they thought I said, ‘Deux café’ when I was ordering coffee, so I had two coffees that day. Most of the time I speak in French and they speak back to me in English.
“I am not speaking French fluently but I can describe things and I can get by.”
Under the guidance of Valcin, JohnsonThompson is in a good place. “The key is knowing the athletes, knowing what works and what does not, what rest days to give and knowing when to push. Putting it all together for a heptathlon is a fine art,” she says.
“He has made me a better heptathlete – I can do ‘heptathlons’ now, instead of having one great event and one really bad event.”
KATARINA Johnson-Thompson is an ambassador for QIPCO British Champions Series. For more info visit britishchampionsseries.com