It’s now time to screen out the doubters
JOHNSON-THOMPSON EYES SUCCESS TO MATCH BAFTA-WINNING SCHOOL FRIEND
KATARINA JohnsonThompson is talking about recognition and the time it can take for some to see what is so clear to others.
In her mind, there was never any doubting the talent or that wider appreciation would eventually come.
‘It was always going to happen one day,’ she says. ‘I’m so glad that it has.’
At this point, it would be obvious to anyone who has been in the orbit of this 26-year-old athlete that she isn’t referring to herself or the belated arrival of medals into her mother’s kitchen.
Goodness, no — self-praise and self-acceptance really aren’t her thing. Far from it. No, she’s thinking about Jodie Comer, the occasionally shy girl from her form at St Julie’s school in Liverpool who more recently has developed a flair for playing a psychopathic Russian assassin in
They remain very close, or, at least, as close as you can be when living in different countries. But, back in the day, they were inseparable — the aspiring athlete and aspiring actress who once got a U grade in the written element of a drama exam.
‘Oh my god, she got like a BAFTA the other week,’ says Johnson-Thompson. ‘It’s amazing. She’s just brilliant. We were in the same form from Year 7 onwards and we’re still on the group chat on our phones (the group is called Hoes in Different Area Codes, as it happens) and we catch up when we can.
‘She was always talented, doing her accents or whatever. People probably saw her speech when she got the BAFTA and heard her Scouse accent and didn’t know what to think.
‘She has been doing so well and I am just happy everyone gets to see it. She totally deserves it.’
It’s not a natural jumping-off point for a discussion with an international athlete prior to the biggest year of her career but, then again, maybe it is.
The thorny business of recognition, of getting credit and feeling worthy of it — they are the topics that make JohnsonThompson one of the more fascinating and complex characters in British sport today.
She is quite the paradox: an athlete who will go to the World Championships this September and then the Tokyo Olympics next July as arguably the topranked member of the team and yet one who seems to forever live with doubts rooted in her past.
Perhaps they serve as a motivational device but there is no denying that a chunk of the anxiety is deep and genuine, given this is the same athlete who told reporters last month that she had been reading up on Impostor Syndrome, doubting your own accomplishments and fearing being exposed as a fraud.
Two days after making those comments, she obliterated a world-class heptathlon field in Austria with a personal best, to go with world indoor gold, Commonwealth Games gold, European outdoor silver and European indoor gold, all since February 2018.
Having left Liverpool in December 2016 for an existence of training, eating and sleeping in a bare-walled apartment in Montpellier, it would seem the younger, frailer, inconsistent Johnson-Thompson has been rebooted as a seriously formidable competitor. Even the throws are getting better.
And that is why the persistence of those doubts is a little puzzling to all bar herself.
‘I don’t know why people would find that odd when you have seen my history,’ she says. There’s a laugh with the comment but she means it.
‘Obviously I am happy with where I am. Gotzis was good — I responded to challenges when I needed to. The last year or so has been just what I wanted — I’ve won some medals, I am competing, I am staying mostly injury-free.
‘The work I have done in France is paying off, I can see the sacrifice is worth it. But, honestly, it’s just part of me I can never take anything for granted any more.
‘In the past, when I have had confidence fuelled by other people, and then it hasn’t gone the way I wanted, it affected me. I am in a much better place now but I can’t get ahead of myself.’
It is useful at this stage to remember the JohnsonThompson that appeared in the public consciousness at London 2012, a waving, smiling teenager who by then had won age-grade world titles in heptathlon and long jump.
The tag of being the next Jessica Ennis was inevitable and it is clear now how the expectations, in combination with a brutal run of injuries and disappointing results, did such damage to her confidence.
‘Back in 2012, I was just loving it,’ she says. ‘Anyone who saw me, I was loving life, so happy to be there and competing. And then maybe the pressure of being good, I think, the pressure of progressing at the rate everyone wanted me to, it got hard.
‘For me, the hardest bit was from 2015 and through 2016. The injuries just came and came and that is when you have problems with confidence. It takes time to overcome that.’
Evidently she still hasn’t. Not fully, anyway. It’s not just about the injuries, of course. It has been a fact of her career that in those two seasons she underperformed, with three fouls in the long jump to drop her from second to 28th in the 2015 World Championships, and also her fade to sixth at the Rio Olympics, where she secretly was carrying an injury.
By her own admission, her temperament before and during those Olympics wasn’t sturdy enough in the moments of greatest stress and it is natural to wonder how she will hold up once the bigger prizes become available this autumn and next summer. That is where she is still untested.
But for all she says about still doubting herself, the signs have never been so good. The medals are a sign of that, even if you sense she might have benefited from keeping them around.
‘My mum takes them away and she has a medal cabinet in her kitchen,’ she says. ‘Mum has a full cabinet with everything in it, from Under-13s medals through national champs and now it is starting to add some bigger titles.’
None come bigger than an Olympics, of course.
‘It’s all about Tokyo,’ she says. ‘It always has been since I moved to France. I went there to get better. I changed everything, learnt new techniques, took a step backwards ahead of the London World Championships (where she finished fifth), so, hopefully, I could take steps forward when it really counts. It was always about Tokyo.
‘I miss home all the time, my family, I miss speaking English. But I have done it for a reason.’