? Briton finds silver lining after losing heptathlon title
? Gold medallist Tatyana Chernova will be main rival in 2012
Jessica Ennis said she felt "devastated" when she realised she had lost her world championship title in a heptathlon that she described "one of the toughest I've had". But by the end of the day she had already found a silver lining to go with her silver medal. "If it was any year then it was good it was this year, before the Olympics, so I can get it out of my system," Ennis said. "I can make the corrections and come back stronger."
Her defeat, to the 23-year-old Russian Tatyana Chernova, may become the first chapter in one of the great rivalries in modern athletics. Ennis is two years older than Chernova and there is, Ennis's coach, Toni Minichello, said, "a hulking gap" between the two of them and the rest of the world. The bronze medallist, Jennifer Oeser, scored 179 fewer points. If Ennis is going to beat Chernova in at the London Games in 2012, she is almost certainly going to have to beat her personal best and Denise Lewis's 11-year-old British record to do it.
Ennis believes she is capable of doing just that. She beat Chernova in five of the seven events, but in effect she lost the title on the javelin, when she was seven metres off her own personal best and exactly 13 metres behind Chernova. "I was so poor and Chernova's was so good and that was enough to take the gold medal," Ennis said. She said she twice slipped on a wet patch of track in her run-up but, as Minichello said, that rather smacked of "clutching at straws".
"I was devastated straight after the javelin," Ennis said. "I knew I had thrown it away. I had a few hours to get my thoughts together. I had to beat her by eight seconds and that was virtually impossible." Minichello joked that it was him, rather than Ennis, who had "done most of the crying. The conversation we had was 'I've let her right in'. So I was a bit weepy."
Ennis's total of 6,751 was 20 points more than the tally that won her the title in Berlin two years ago, but Chernova still finished 129 points ahead. "I think it's been a matter of time for Chernova," Ennis said. "She's had all components, but had just never put it all together in a big championships. She did today and she's a really good, strong athlete. I've always been aware of that and I need to go away and work a bit harder so I can take her next year."
It was a mixed performance from Ennis. She set PBs in the shot put and 800m, and equalled her best in the long jump, but was awful in the javelin, poor in the high jump and, in Minichello's words "went through the hurdles like a lumberjack". He added that for all the talk of making the mistakes now, "you want to win everything you can", but that the pain of defeat was only going to make Ennis work harder still.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2011/aug/30/jessica-ennis-silver-medal-heptathlon
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