£1m Jessica
How lucrative sponsorship contracts have already made Olympic favourite a fortune
WHETHER she wins an Olympic medal or not, it seems Jessica Ennis has struck gold.
The 26-year-old heptathlete is on course to earn a staggering £1million from lucrative sponsorship deals this year – making her the first female athlete to do so.
As favourite to take gold in the women’s heptathlon, she has secured around twice as many of these deals as most of her rivals.
And this week, she was pictured enjoying the perks of just one of them – a £78,930 Jaguar XKR donated by the car firm.
She sped off in her five-litre, super- charged V8 engine vehicle after a day’s training at the English Institute of Sport in her hometown of Sheffield.
The flash sports car, more often associated with Premier League football players, was an indication of the enormous personal wealth Ennis is accumulating in the runup to the London 2012 Games.
She has secured major sponsorship deals with Adidas, BP, Aviva, Olay, Omega, British Airways, Jaguar and Powerade. Most team GB athletes have around half as many contracts. But with such backing comes responsibility, and at training this week she dutifully ensured she was head-to-toe in Adidas, from her trainers to her tracksuit.
The Adidas deal is worth up to £320,000 a year, including performance bonuses, and is believed to be the highest secured by any Team GB athlete. That contract alone could pay off any mortgage on her £ 330,000 three- bedroom semidetached home in an upmarket suburb of Sheffield.
It puts her on track to earn £1million in 2012, on top of the estimated £700,000 she took home last year.
Her extraordinary earnings are a far cry from her modest upbringing in a terrace house in Sheffield, with her painter and decorator father Vinnie Ennis and social worker mother Alison Powell.
And experts said last night that she has the potential to earn millions more if she takes gold.
Matthew Glendinning, of sponsorship experts Sports Marketing Frontiers, said: ‘The people around Ennis have done a remarkable job to put her in a potentially winning position on the track and off it.
‘However, even they may be surprised at the wave of attention and commercial opportunity that will be unleashed if she wins gold.
‘ The heptathlon competition will keep her in the limelight for two full days and her ability to appeal to men and women of all ages make her possibly the biggest female Olympic star Great Britain has ever seen.’
Ennis has also increased her profile by taking part in several risque photo shoots for men’s magazines, including one for the August issue of GQ magazine in which she appears in wet-look hot pants, stilettos and a low-cut red blazer.
She is favourite to win the women’s heptathlon, with odds of 5/6 at Coral and 4/6 at Ladbrokes.