Hall of Fame... Jackie Joyner-Kersee: Heptathlon's original Golden Girl who became the First Lady of track and field

By Laura Williamson for MailOnline Follow @@laura_mail

Published: 19:54 EST, 5 March 2014 | Updated: 09:39 EST, 10 March 2014

At the 2012 US Track and Field Championships, a tall, slim woman in a tracksuit watched the long jump final. Brittney Reese, who would go on to become the Olympic champion in London later that summer, won with a final round leap of 7.15 metres.

Some 18 years earlier that interested spectator had jumped 7.49m, still the American record. Her name was Jackie Joyner-Kersee.

Daley Thompson, the double Olympic decathlon champion, joked Joyner-Kersee could still have won the US title at the age of 50. He also called her the 'greatest female athlete of the 20th century'.

Joyner-Kersee blushed and giggled at both comments, but Thompson was not joking with his second piece of praise.

Track and field legend: Jackie Joyner-Kersee won six Olympic medals in heptathlon and long jump combined

Prolific: The American won heptathlon gold medals at the 1988 and 1992 Olympic Games

High praise: Daley Thompson (left) called her the greatest female athlete of the 20th century

Joyner-Kersee really was that good - and, pivotally, that good for that long. If sporting greatness is measured by the ability to come back and achieve again, Joyner-Kersee must be considered one of the greats - male or female, in track and field and beyond.

She won four World Championship titles and six Olympic medals, including three golds, from 1984 to 1996. She set the heptathlon world record, which still stands today, in 1988, by amassing 7,291 points.

Only after she broke the world record for the first time, in July 1986, did her husband and coach, Bob Kersee, allow Jackie Joyner to take his name. She then broke her world record again a month later, just for good measure.

Only three heptathletes have ever passed the 7,000 points barrier, yet Joyner-Kersee did it six times. She boasts the six best points scores in the history of event. 2012 Olympic champion Jessica Ennis-Hill's personal best and the British record, by way of comparison, is 6,955.

Unlike Ennis-Hill, however, Joyner-Kersee did not win Olympic gold on home soil. At the age of 22, in her first Olympic Games in Los Angeles in 1984, the American missed out on the title by five points.

Superhuman: Astonishingly, Joyner-Kersee holds the top six point scores ever in the heptathlon

Different league: Jess Ennis-Hill is the best around currently but even she wouldn't challenge Joyner-Kersee

It was the long jump, her strongest event, that cost her after she fouled her first two jumps and had to play it safe with the third.

Joyner-Kersee knew she was physically ready, despite a hamstring injury that hampered her in the final 800 metres, but not mentally. It was to prove one of the most important lessons of her career.

'People don’t understand the struggles of a multi-event athlete,' she said in 2005. 'You’re always tired and you just have to learn to deal with it.

'After LA, I said I would never hide behind anything again. You can’t have excuses and be a world-class athlete.' 

She stayed true to her word. By the time of the Seoul Games in 1988 she was the overwhelming favourite for the heptathlon and the long jump and she delivered on both counts. She was so dominant it seemed like Jackie against herself, and a bid to raise the heptathlon world record, rather than a genuine competition between athletes. It also seemed, however, too good to be true.

Respected: Her husband Bobby Kersee, here with the 1996 Atlanta Olympics 100m champion Gail Devers, has worked with many celebrated female athletes in his career

Florence Griffith-Joyner, a triple gold medallist at the 1988 Games, was married to and coached by Joyner-Kersee's brother, 1984 Olympic triple jump champion Al Joyner, and had been coached by Bob Kersee previously.

Accusations of drug use swirled around, most notably from 1984 800m gold medallist Joaquim Cruz, prompting Joyner-Kersee to vigorously deny any wrong-doing: both publicly and in the journal she kept throughout the Olympics.

Longevity: She even went on to win the bronze medal in the 1996 long jump

'I do not take steroids,' she said in 1988. 'I never have. It's sad to me that people want to point fingers. I don't do that. That's not me. I wouldn't feel like a human being. I've never thought about taking drugs, even in childhood. I see what they have done to my own family.

'My grandmother was shot to death by the man she was married to. He was involved with drugs and alcohol. Some days my father would come home drunk.' 

'There are a lot of reasons now I won't even take a drink. It took a long time before I would even take an aspirin.' 

Her dominance in the heptathlon - a two-day test of seven events - was such that she was able to retain her Olympic gold in Barcelona in 1992, and add another bronze medal in the long jump.

This is when I remember first watching her: that rangy 5ft 10in frame, all elegance and steely concentration, with a beaming, almost shy, smile at the end.

Joyner-Kersee was the US 100m hurdles champion in 1994 and won her sixth and final Olympic medal, a bronze in the long jump at the Atlanta Games on 1996, aged 34. She was seventh going into the final round, yet pulled out a leap of seven metres to propel herself onto the podium.

Joyner-Kersee's longevity and range - she was also a talented volleyball and basketball player - earn her a place in Sportsmail's Hall of Fame. But it is also important to recognise Joyner-Kersee as a successful female athlete; a girl from East St Louis, Illinois, who showed what was possible.

Born 10 years before the introduction of Title IX, which forbids discrimination on the basis of gender in federal-funded schools, Joyner-Kersee was named after Jackie Kennedy. She certainly went on to become the First Lady of track and field, that's for sure.

Relative: Florence Griffith-Joyner was married to and coached by Joyner-Kersee's brother

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