Following Olympic debut in Paris, Hall targets top of the podium in LA

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

“I’m going to call you,” the reply from Jackie Joyner-Kersee started.

Joyner-Kersee – the heptathlon world record-holder 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 US all-rounder who already sits at fifth on the world all-time list. Joyner-Kersee wanted to better understand what was going through Hall’s mind by hearing her voice. Few could empathise better with Hall's situation.

Forty years after Joyner-Kersee opened her first Olympics in Los Angeles with an injured leg, Hall was doing the same in Paris.

“I just know from my own experience in never being injured before and then getting ready to go to an Olympic games ... I didn’t have anyone who could pick up the phone and call me,” Joyner-Kersee said. “And I wanted to do the same for Anna.”

Hall ultimately finished fifth in Paris, then began laying the groundwork for her golden moment in four years, at the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028 where, health permitting, she could be in position to become the first US gold medallist in the heptathlon since Joyner-Kersee in 1992.

“I want her to continue to believe that she has everything that it is going to take,” Joyner-Kersee said.

Joyner-Kersee isn’t the only standout from the 1984 Olympics who believes Hall could leave 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 keep on enjoying what she’s doing,” Thompson said. “It won’t always be a straightforward case that she’s going to get faster, that she’s going to get stronger. All of that stuff takes time the further up the mountain you go. She’s near enough to the top as it is, and she just needs to have one or two different plans on how to get to the top because sometimes you do a bunch of stuff, it doesn’t work. You just have to be prepared to understand if it’s not working.

“She’s doing really well. She’s only been doing it a few years and I think that you look at her now we think, she’s a seasoned, senior athlete – but she’s not yet. She’s still got loads of experiences that she’s going to have and she’s going to be able to put to good use.”

Thompson arrived in Los Angeles in 1984 with plenty of experience, having also won Olympic gold four years earlier in Moscow. Memories of the opening ceremony in Los Angeles remain vivid for both – Thompson still marvelling at performers who flew high using jet packs, and Joyner-Kersee at the sheer size of the crowd inside the LA Memorial Coliseum that signalled to her the magnitude of the Games.

During the same opening ceremony, however, Joyner-Kersee realised “my leg is not ready,” she recalled. Despite hamstring trouble, Joyner-Kersee earned a silver medal in the heptathlon over the next two days. She was seriously hurt just one other time in her career, she said – four years later at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, when Joyner-Kersee won gold despite “excruciating pain” from patellar tendonitis. Thompson also was hurt in Seoul, finishing fourth despite injuring a hamstring only days beforehand.

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

That’s the lesson Hall is learning now, as well.

In the heptathlon all-time rankings only Larisa Nikitina (7007), Nafissatou Thiam (7013), Carolina Kluft (7032) and Joyner-Kersee (7291) rank higher than Hall’s personal best score of 6988, which she set at Götzis in 2023. Only two months later she earned a heptathlon silver medal at the 2023 World Championships in Budapest. Yet a knee injury in January 2024 suffered while training and subsequent surgery left her unable to build off her previous season’s momentum.

By February, her recovery had begun under the optimistic aim of finding a way to still win gold in Paris. Her next five months were rarely smooth, however.

“It was very painful emotionally and physically,” Hall said. “I was in pain a lot of days at practice trying things that I didn’t want to do, but doctors said, ‘If you want to push, this is what we’re doing.’ Emotionally, that’s super, super humbling. The first few days trying to high jump again, I couldn’t do a single-leg hop and I’m like, how am I supposed to jump 1.85m in six weeks? It was definitely the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

Competing in the combined events requires a certain tolerance for pain. Hall jumped a season’s best of 1.89m in the high jump, her favourite event, in Paris, a result she called “the most special thing” of her competition given the difficulty she endured to regain her form following surgery. She fell asleep by 1am after the first day and awoke less than five hours later to begin her preparation for the second day. In the final discipline, she ran 2:04.39 in the 800m, the fastest time of anyone in the field.

“When you see her out there perform, you see that she loves it,” Joyner-Kersee said. “Even through her pain, she would never mention how much pain she has gone through and that she continues to go through now. When you see her she’s giving her heart, everything out there. Even trying to go two minutes, two flat, I would never do that. That is determination and grit.

“I’m so glad that they allow me to be in the circle and I told her, ‘At any given time, pick up the phone’.”

Andrew Greif for World Athletics