As she is preparing for the 2015 World Athletics Championships that will take place in Beijing in August, Katarina Johnson-Thompson is hopeful that she could win her first World Championships medal in heptathlon.
The 22 year-old is the current 2015 European indoor champion in pentathlon, after taking the European indoor gold in Prague in March, when she also achieved a record 5,000 points and broke Jessica Ennis-Hill's British pentathlon record of 4,965 points, to become only the second athlete to ever reach that target. She is now only 13 points behind the world record set by Nataliya Dobrynska in 2012.
Unfortunately, the athlete from Liverpool injured a knee while winning her title in Prague; due to the injury she will not be able to attend this weekend's prestigious Hypo-Meeting in Gotzis, a small town in Austria. She won in Gotzis in 2014, but later in the year she could not get into any of the major championships because of a foot injury.
However, she is now happy with the progress of her recovery from the Prague injury and hopes to be fully fit for Beijing. Nonetheless, some of Johnson- Thompson supporters will be disappointed not to see her at the Gotzis meeting at the weekend, were they expected her to compete against the returning 2012 Olympic heptathlon champion, Ennis-Hill. The 29 year-old athlete from Sheffield is making her comeback this weekend, having been away from competitions since she collected her gold medal at the London Olympics in 2012.
She got married in 2013 and in July 2014 gave birth to her son.
The younger athlete thinks that her rivalry with Ennis-Hill will be healthy for the sport; the Liverpudlian, who broke her Mum's heart by switching from ballet lessons to athletics, won the gold medal in the heptathlon at the 2009 World Youth Championships in Brixen, Italy.
She also represented Great Britain in the heptathlon at the 2012 Olympic Games and finished 15th. She was then fifth at the 2013 World Champions in Moscow; Johnson-Thompson now believes that Beijing is her time for a medal.
