Ten Greatest American Summer Olympians: No. 4 Jackie Joyner-Kersee
Jackie Joyner-Kersee is flat out one of the best athletes the United States has ever produced, male or female.
Born in the slums of East St. Louis, Illinois in 1962, Joyner-Kersee was named after First Lady Jaqueline Kennedy. As her grandmother claimed at the time, “Some day this girl will be the first lady of something.” And she was most definitely right.
Joyner-Kersee’s upbringing was anything but ideal. At 11 years old she saw a man shot in front of her house. Soon after that, her grandfather got drunk and shot her grandmother while she slept. That little girl from one of the roughest neighborhoods in the country, grew up to dominate track and field. Despite battling asthma for her most of her life, Joyner-Kersee became the face of women’s athletics in the United States.
As a high schooler, she qualified for the finals in the long jump at the 1980 Olympic Trials, but didn’t make the U.S. team. It wouldn’t matter, as America boycotted the 1980 games anyway. She claimed she was inspired to compete in multiple sports disciplines after seeing a made-for-TV movie about Babe Didrikson Zaharias.
Joyner-Kersee parlayed her high school success into a scholarship to UCLA, where she became a star in track and field and basketball. But during her freshman year her mother was struck by meningitis and slipped into a coma. She passed away at just 37 years old. Joyner-Kersee was only 18 at the time.
While at UCLA she was a starter on the basketball team in each of her first three years (1980-83), then redshirted during the 1983-84 season to concentrate on track for the Olympics. She regained her starting role for the 1984-85 campaign. How good was she in basketball? She scored 1,167 points in her career, and was honored as one of the school’s 15 greatest players in 1998. And basketball wasn’t even close to being her best sport. At UCLA she also formed a bond with assistant track coach Bob Kersee. The two would wind up getting married in 1986.
Joyner-Kersee finally burst onto the Olympic scene at the 1984 games in Los Angeles. There, she competed in the heptathlon and was leading the competition by 31 points over Australia’s Glynis Nunn heading into the final event, the 800 meters. Joyner-Kersee’s leg was wrapped heavily thanks to a hamstring injury, and she wound up finishing 2.13 seconds behind Nunn in the 800. Nunn had overtaken her for the gold by just five points, or one second. While a silver medal is nothing to sneeze at, that defeat lit a fire under Joyner-Kersee as she came to dominate the seven-event competition for the next decade.
Joyner-Kersee returned to the 1988 Olympics in Seoul as a 26-year-old and blitzed the competition in the heptathlon. After setting the world record earlier in the year (7,215), she wound up re-setting a world record at the Olympics, with a score of 7,291 points. Second place finisher Sabine John of East Germany was a ridiculous 394 points behind. But she Joyner-Kersee wasn’t done. She also participated in the long jump, where she set the Olympic record in qualifying (7.27 meters), then re-set it the next day (7.40 meters) to win gold by almost half a foot.
At the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, Joyner-Kersee once again blew away the competition. She won the heptathlon with a score of 7,044, 199 points ahead of second place. Then she took bronze in the long jump with a leap of 7.07 meters, missing out on gold by just 0.07 meters.
Joyner-Kersee injured her right hamstring during the Olympic Trials in 1996, but still qualified for the heptathlon and long jump for the Atlanta games. Unfortunately, she was not fully recovered by the time the heptathlon started, and after the first event (100-meter hurdles) she was forced to withdraw. She was only partially recovered when the long jump began, but she managed to qualify for the final round. She was stuck in sixth place until her final jump and looked to be headed home without any hardware. Out of nowhere Joyner-Kersee unleashed a jump of 7.00 meters on the nose, which put her in third place, 0.02 meters out of the silver spot and just 0.12 meters behind Nigeria’s Chioma Ajunwa for gold.
Considering the devastating hamstring injury Joyner-Kersee fought through, that final jump represented a major Olympic triumph. She retired from track after those games at the age of 34. She played professional basketball for a year before returning to track for the 1998 Goodwill Games. In her return, she won the heptathlon with a score of 6,502.
At the age of 38, Joyner-Kersee tried to qualify for long jump at the 2000 Summer Olympics in Australia, but failed to make the U.S. team. She finished in sixth at trials.
Joyner-Kersee finished her Olympic career with three gold medals, one silver and two bronzes, all in individual events. She also owns four world championships and to this day holds the heptathlon world record as well as the top six scores in the event all-time. Her personal-best long jump of 7.49 (which she did twice) is still second on the all-time list and just three centimeters behind the world record. Additionally, her Olympic long jump record of 7.40 still stands.
Sports Illustrated named Joyner-Kersee the greatest female athlete of the 20th century and it’s hard to argue with that assessment. She was a multi-sport standout who dominated the heptathlon for nearly a decade, rewriting the record books in the process.
Today the 54-year-old Joyner-Kersee is an ambassador for humanitarian and philanthropic endeavors, including mentoring the families and children in her hometown of East St. Louis. She is also a traveling speaker.
If you were a sports fan during the 1980s and 1990s, you know just how dominant Joyner-Kersee was. She was arguably the world’s most famous female athlete during that era. And she’s certainly one of the greatest Olympians the United States has ever produced.
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