Jackie Joyner-Kersee

She married her track coach, Bob Kersee, in 1986. The couple established the Jackie Joyner-Kersee Foundation in 1988. The foundation provides youth, adults, and families with athletic lessons and the resources to improve their quality of life.

Jackie Joyner-Kersee along with several other athletes and sportspeople like Andre Agassi, Muhammad Ali, Lance Armstrong, Warrick Dunn, Mia Hamm, Jeff Gordon, and Tony Hawk founded Athletes for Hope, a charitable organization, in 2007.

Jacqueline Joyner was born on March 3, 1962, in East St. Louis, Illinois; she was named after Jacqueline Kennedy.

Energetic and active from a young age, she became interested in sports early on. She attended the East St. Louis Lincoln Senior High School where she excelled in athletics and qualified for the finals in the long jump at the 1980 Olympic Trials, finishing eighth.

A good student, she performed well in studies and graduated near the top of her class. Throughout her high school years she competed on the school’s volleyball, basketball, and track teams. As a junior, she set the Illinois high-school girls’ long jump record at 6.68 meters (20 feet 7.5 inches).

As a result of her sporting success in high school, she earned a scholarship to the University of California, Los Angeles, where she initially focused on basketball and the long jump. But as the 1984 Summer Olympic Games in Los Angeles neared, she focused more on training for the heptathlon.

Jackie Joyner-Kersee competed in the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles and won the silver medal in the heptathlon, finishing just behind Australian Glynis Nunn.

She bettered her performance in the 1986 Goodwill Games where she became the first woman to score over 7,000 points in a heptathlon event. Her scintillating performance earned her the James E. Sullivan Award as the top amateur athlete in the United States.

In 1987, she won the gold medals in both long jump and heptathlon at the World Championships in Rome.

She trained really hard for the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, South Korea, and gave some of her best performances there. She set the heptathlon world record (7,291 points) while winning the gold medal in the heptathlon. She also won the gold in long jump.

Her magnificent form continued over the ensuing years and when she participated in the 1991 World Championships, she was the favorite to retain both her World titles earned four years earlier. She won the long jump easily with a 7.32 m (24 ft 1⁄4 in) jump but then sustained an injury that prevented her from participating in the heptathlon.

In 1986 she won the James E. Sullivan Award. She also won the Jesse Owens Award twice (1986 and 1987).

She was inducted into the St. Louis Walk of Fame in 2000.

In 2005, she was inducted as a Laureate of the Lincoln Academy of Illinois and awarded the Order of Lincoln (the State's highest honor) by the Governor of Illinois in the area of Sports.

She is the recipient of the 2011 Dick Enberg Award, College Sports Information Director of America (CoSIDA).

Sports Illustrated’ voted her the greatest female athlete of the 20th century.