Jackie Joyner-Kersee

Jacqueline Joyner was born on March 3, 1962, in East St. Louis, Illinois. She was named after Jacqueline Kennedy, the First Lady of the United States. During her high school years at East St. Louis Lincoln Senior High School, she excelled in multiple sports including track, basketball, and volleyball. She participated in the 1980 Olympic Trials for the long jump, finishing 8th, and was inspired by Babe Didrikson Zaharias to pursue multi-disciplinary track and field events. Joyner-Kersee attended the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) from 1980 to 1985, where she was a prominent athlete in both track and field and basketball. She was a starter for the UCLA basketball team for four seasons and scored 1,167 points during her collegiate career. In track, she earned the Broderick Award as the nation’s best female collegiate track and field competitor in 1983 and 1985, and the Honda-Broderick Cup in 1985 as the nation’s best female collegiate athlete. She graduated with a bachelor’s degree in history in 1986.

Joyner-Kersee’s competitive career saw significant achievements, beginning with a silver medal in the heptathlon at the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, where she placed fifth in the long jump. In 1986, she became the first woman to break 7,000 points in the heptathlon at the Goodwill Games and received the James E. Sullivan Award as the top amateur athlete in the United States. At the 1988 Seoul Summer Olympics, she won gold medals in both the heptathlon, setting a still-standing world record of 7,291 points, and the long jump with an Olympic record of 7.40 meters. She secured her second Olympic heptathlon gold in the 1992 Barcelona Summer Olympics, also winning a bronze in the long jump. Despite a hamstring injury at the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta, she earned a bronze medal in the long jump, marking her sixth Olympic medal. She retired after the Atlanta Games and briefly played professional basketball for the Richmond Rage of the American Basketball League in 1996, appearing in 17 games.

Following her retirement from track and field, Joyner-Kersee became a philanthropist, focusing on children’s education, racial equality, and women’s rights. She established the Jackie Joyner-Kersee Youth Center Foundation in 1988 to promote athletics and academics among underprivileged youth in her hometown. In 2007, she co-founded Athletes for Hope, an organization dedicated to empowering athletes to contribute to community and charitable causes, alongside notable figures like Andre Agassi, Muhammad Ali, and Mia Hamm. She also served on the board of directors for USA Track & Field, the sport’s national governing body. Joyner-Kersee has been widely recognized for her contributions, including being named the greatest female athlete of the 20th century by Sports Illustrated for Women in 1999 and being inducted into the National Track & Field Hall of Fame. The female Jesse Owens Award was renamed the Jackie Joyner-Kersee Award in 2013.