Ennis recorded a third straight win at the Hypo Meeting, with a memorable performance
She leaves it as the new UK record-holder and now the overwhelming favourite for Olympic gold in two months’ time after blowing away her key London 2012 rivals with a performance that reclaimed her place as the queen of multi-events. And yes, her morale has been well and truly boosted.
Her final points tally of 6,906 did not just break Denise Lewis’s 12-year-old record of 6,831, it destroyed it, guaranteeing her entry to an elite club of just eight women who have surpassed the 6,900-point mark. Now there is just the small matter of an Olympic gold medal to emulate Lewis’s triumph in Sydney in 2000 before she can claim to be the greatest all-round athlete Britain has ever produced.
The omens are good. It was at the same combined events meeting in the foothills of the Austrian Alps that Daley Thompson broke the decathlon world record for the first time in 1980 before going on to claim the first of his two Olympic titles in Moscow.
Ennis, who is already the poster girl of London 2012 despite never having competed in an Olympic Games, now has the opportunity to carve out her own place in athletics history safe in the knowledge that if she can reproduce the kind of form she has shown over the last two days, the one championship title she has never won should be hers.
Just as significant as her points total, the biggest achieved in a heptathlon since the great Swede Carolina Kluft scored 7,032 at the World Championships in Osaka five years ago, was the margin of her victory over most of the main rivals she will face this summe
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