After making his Olympic debut in Paris, Hall is aiming for the top of the podium in LA | FUNCTION

It was late on August 8, after the first day of the heptathlon at the Paris Olympics, when Anna Hall sent a text message asking for advice.

“I’m going to call you,” Jackie Joyner-Kersee’s response began.

Joyner-Kersee – the world record holder in the heptathlon since 1988, when she won the first of her two Olympic gold medals in the event – ​​had in recent years become a mentor to Hall, the 23-year-old American all-rounder who is already ranked fifth in the world list of all time. Joyner-Kersee wanted to better understand what was going through Hall’s mind by hearing her voice. Few could empathize better with Hall’s situation.

Forty years after Joyner-Kersee opened her first Olympic Games in Los Angeles with an injured leg, Hall did the same in Paris.

“I know from my own experience, never having been injured before and then getting ready to go to the Olympics…I didn’t have anyone to pick up the phone and call me,” Joyner-Kersee said. “And I wanted to do the same for Anna.”

Hall eventually finished fifth in Paris and then began laying the groundwork for her golden moment in four years, at the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics, where, health permitting, she could be in a position to take first American gold medalist in the heptathlon since Joyner. Kersee in 1992.

“I want her to continue to believe that she has everything she needs,” Joyner-Kersee said.

Joyner-Kersee isn’t the only standout from the 1984 Olympics who believes Hall could walk away with a medal when the Games return to Los Angeles.

Hall “can only go up from here,” said Daley Thompson, who earned Olympic decathlon gold in 1984.

“Anna needs to stay healthy, and above all, she needs to continue to enjoy what she does,” Thompson said. ‘It won’t always be obvious that she will get faster, that she will get stronger. All that stuff takes time the further up the mountain you go. She’s already close enough to the top, and she just needs to have one or two different plans on how to get to the top, because sometimes you do a lot of things and it doesn’t work. You just have to be willing to understand if it doesn’t work.

“She is doing very well. She’s only been doing it for a few years and I think when you look at her, we think she’s a seasoned senior athlete, but she’s not yet. She still has a lot of experiences that she will gain and that she will be able to put to good use.

Thompson arrived in Los Angeles in 1984 with plenty of experience, having also won Olympic gold in Moscow four years earlier. Memories of the opening ceremony in Los Angeles remain vivid for both: Thompson still marvels at the performers who flew high on jetpacks, and Joyner-Kersee at the huge crowd at the LA Memorial Coliseum that made her realize the magnitude of the Games. .

However, during the same opening ceremony, Joyner-Kersee realized that “my leg is not ready yet,” she recalls. Despite hamstring problems, Joyner-Kersee won a silver medal in the heptathlon the following two days. Only once more in her career has she been seriously injured, she said — four years later at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, when Joyner-Kersee won gold despite “excruciating pain” from patellar tendonitis. Thompson was also injured in Seoul and finished fourth despite suffering a hamstring injury just days beforehand.

“I learned a lot about myself: to be the best in the world, things have to happen,” Joyner-Kersee said.

That is also the lesson Hall is learning now.

In the all-time rankings in the heptathlon, only Larisa Nikitina (7007), Nafissatou Thiam (7013), Carolina Kluft (7032) and Joyner-Kersee (7291) are higher than Hall’s personal best of 6988, which she set in Götzis in 2023 put down. Just two months later, she won a silver medal in the heptathlon at the 2023 World Championships in Budapest. But a knee injury suffered during training in January 2024 and subsequent surgery prevented her from building on the momentum from her previous season.

By February, her recovery had begun with the optimistic goal of finding a way to still win gold in Paris. However, her next five months rarely went smoothly.

“It was very painful emotionally and physically,” Hall said. “I was in a lot of pain during training trying to do things I didn’t want to do, but the doctors said, ‘If you want to push, this is what we do.’ Emotionally, that’s super, super humbling. The first few days when I tried high jumping again, I couldn’t do a jump with one leg and I thought, how am I going to jump 6 feet in six weeks? It was definitely the hardest thing I’ve ever done have done.”

Participation in the combined events requires a certain tolerance for pain. Hall jumped a season’s best over 1.89m in the high jump, her favorite event, in Paris, a result she called “the most special” of her competition given the difficulty she had in regaining her form after an operation. She fell asleep at 1 a.m. after the first day and woke up less than five hours later to begin her preparations for the second day. In the last discipline she ran 2:04.39 in the 800 meters, the fastest time of anyone in the field.

“When you see her perform there, you can tell she loves it,” Joyner-Kersee said. “Even in her pain, she would never say how much pain she has gone through and continues to go through. When you see her, she gives her heart, everything beyond. Even if I tried two minutes twice, I would never do that. That is determination and perseverance.

“I’m so happy they let me sit in the circle and I told her, ‘Pick up the phone anytime’.”

Andrew Greif for World Athletics