Among the track-and-field events on the Olympic program, the heptathlon hasn’t generated much, if any, buzz in the United States in recent years. The legendary Jackie Joyner-Kersee was the last American to win gold in the multidisciplinary sport, in which women compete in 100-m hurdles, high jump, shot put, the 200 m, long jump, javelin, and the 800 m—in that order—over a two-day period; she won consecutive Olympic titles in 1988 and 1992 and took silver at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. That’s a 32-year heptathlon-victory drought.
Anna Hall, the 23-year-old recently crowned heptathlon champ at the U.S. Olympic trials, takes her event’s lack of sizzle to heart. “A lot of people don’t know what heptathlon is when I tell them what I do,” she says. “So I definitely think there’s a small chip on my shoulder of, ‘OK, I want to show you guys that America can be good at this too.’” Hall’s very aware, she says, that taking Olympic gold is “kind of my duty, if I want to make heptathlon well-known in America.”
She may complete her task in Paris. Hall won bronze at the 2022 world championships and followed up that performance by winning silver at last year’s worlds, in Budapest. An ascent to the top of the podium at the Olympics seems like a natural progression; the heptathlon takes place on Aug. 8 and 9, at Stade de France. “She’s going to definitely be a contender,” Joyner-Kersee, who mentors Hall, tells TIME. “She is a greedy type of athlete. She’s going to dig and go deeper than you’d ever imagine.”
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Hall hails from an athletic family. Her father, David, was a three-sport athlete at Michigan, playing football and basketball, and competing in the decathlon. Her mother, Ronette Ivey Hall, is “athletic,” says Anna, “but didn’t really grow up with a chance to do sports.” Raised just south of Denver, Hall tried a variety of sports—basketball, volleyball, soccer, lacrosse, field hockey—before falling in love with track and field. She started out doing the high jump and running the 1,500 m, an uncommon combo, and told her dad she wanted to make the Olympics in both. “He was like, ‘No, that’s probably not going to happen,’” says Hall. But she didn’t want to stop either event, so they found a way to combine her passions: the heptathlon.
She became a high school star, and the University of Georgia recruited her to join their track-and-field team. At the 2021 Olympic trials, after her sophomore year, Hall had a shot to make the U.S. team, but moments into the 100-m hurdles, the opening event, she clipped the eighth hurdle and crashed into the track. She broke the navicular bone in her foot and couldn’t put any weight on it for three months. She was also in the process of transferring schools, since her coach at Georgia had left.
“That was one of the hardest times for me,” says Hall. “For months, I was just like, ‘I think this is my rock bottom.’ Nothing was working out how I wanted. At that point in time, I wasn’t great at looking ahead. ‘Oh, the next Olympics is in three years.’ It just felt like my dream was over.”
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But she rehabbed at her new school, the University of Florida, and won both indoor and outdoor NCAA championships. She met Joyner-Kersee at the outdoor event, in Eugene, Ore., in the spring of 2022. Joyner-Kersee was impressed that Hall competed in the open 400-m hurdles race as well as the heptathlon. “You’re talking about determination and grit,” says Joyner-Kersee. Hall’s two world-championship medals soon followed.
Hall has attracted her fair share of sponsor attention, from Coca-Cola to the pet-food company Nulo, which has featured Hall and her family dog, Emma, in ads. Emma lives with Hall’s parents in Naples, Fla., a few hours south of Hall’s home base in Gainesville, Fla. “I’ve told anybody that will listen that I’m getting a dog after Paris,” says Hall.
Of the heptathlon events, she considers the high jump her “baby”; she finished first in both the high jump and 800 m, the final event, at trials. She says she’s struggled most with the javelin: last fall an errant throw during practice landed close enough to someone warming up that they stopped and were none too pleased. But she finished third in javelin at the trials.
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She devotes equal time to all seven events. “I always tell my coaches, I feel like I’m holding marbles in my hands, and I’m just trying not to let one drop at any given time,” says Hall. “But in the back of your head, you actually know that your strong events have to hit. So I think those are even a little bit more pressure than your worst ones.”
Hall calls the Olympics part of her plan, not her dream. “I don’t know why I was so confident at 7 years old,” she says. “But I was like, ‘Yep, I’m going. There was no maybe.’”
Ever since Sweden’s King Gustaf V told decathlon champ Jim Thorpe at the 2012 Olympics, “Sir, you are the greatest athlete in the world,” that title—World’s Greatest Athlete—has been reserved for the Olympic decathlon champion. So if Hall wins the heptathlon (men compete in the decathlon, women in the heptathlon), would she consider herself the world’s greatest female athlete? She hedges. “There are so many different ways you can measure that,” says Hall.
Well, with a Paris gold, would she at least take the title of world’s greatest female track-and-field athlete?
“Yes, I would,” says Hall.
And that should get your attention.