Jessica Ennis looks forward to a golden future as the 'face of 2012'

Her nickname might be “Tadpole” on the track and field but Jessica Ennis has just become a big fish in the Olympic pond.
With her heptathlon gold medal triumph at the World Championships on Sunday, the Sheffield athlete is set to make the leap from obscurity to Britain’s Olympic pin-up.
Marketing experts predict that the 23-year-old will become a millionaire by the 2012 Games and bookmakers are reporting a surge of bets on her becoming the next BBC Sports Personality of the Year.
“I had a lot of pressure and a lot of expectation from everyone,” said Ennis. “Luckily I was able to control that and deliver and that’s great practice for 2012 and hopefully I can do the same there.”
It has been a remarkable 12 months for the young athlete who, this time last year, was nursing a triple stress fracture to her right foot that left her wondering if her career might be over.
The injury not only ruled her out of the Beijing Olympics but forced her to retrain to take off from her other foot in the long jump.
Ennis’s family are thought to have lost about £18,000 in flights, tickets and accommodation for Beijing when she pulled out and they stayed away from the World Championships to reduce the pressure on her.
Yet in Berlin at the weekend Ennis led the competition throughout, becoming the first British woman to win the World Championships title with a personal best of 6,731 points.
Now she is being touted as the “face of 2012”. It is a role that the London Olympics organisers had envisaged going to the sprinter Christine Ohuruogu, who grew up close to the Olympic Park, before persistent questions over missed drug tests stained her seemingly perfect marketing story.
Ennis appears to have nothing in her past that could scare off the brand-makers. Her career began aged 10 when she was reluctantly packed off to an athletics scheme at the Don Valley Stadium in Sheffield during the school holidays. She has a degree in psychology from the University of Sheffield and a long-term boyfriend with whom she shares a home a mile down the road from her parents.
“British athletics has a new superstar and it is only a matter of time before big brands come calling,” said Jon Ridgeon, the managing director of Fast Track, a sports marketing agency. “She is a bright, articulate and personable individual who will no doubt have made London 2012 partners, such as EDF Energy, BT and BP, sit up and take notice of what she can bring to their brands. Her performance and her gold medal elevates her stock and marketability to a new level.”
Tim Crow, the chief executive of Synergy Sponsorship, said: “She has scarcity value and no baggage. Missing Beijing in fact worked in her favour because she is new news.” Ennis could now earn commercial revenues of more than £100,000 a year from off-track activities and appearance fees for major athletics events. Her National Lottery funding will increase from £19,500 to £25,000 this autumn and she will continue to receive support, such as access to facilities and sports scientists at the English Institute of Sport in Sheffield, worth about £70,000 a year.
Ennis will also be in line for a gold medal bonus from adidas, her main sponsor, in a deal that should rise in value to at least £100,000 a year. Her company accounts show that assets of £14,632 in 2007 had increased to £89,416 last year. Her parents, Vinnie Ennis and Alison Powell, and Ennis’s younger sister, Carmel, 20, said yesterday that they could hardly bear to look at the television screen as they watched her triumph.
“She phoned us half an hour after she’d won it and was screaming, ‘Mum, I’ve done it’,” Ms Powell, a social care worker, said. “I still can’t believe it. That’s my daughter up there on the top of the podium, the champion of the world.”
Mr Ennis, a decorator who moved to Britain from Jamaica when he was 13, said: “Ever since she was a little girl she always wanted to stand on the top of a podium and there she is. I’m just so proud of her.”
Source:The times