The combined events athlete, who used to set off fireworks as a teenager but was burned out by years of injury and bad luck, talks to Ben Bloom about her determination to get back on track and why she gave up the heptathlon.
Back in 2019, after winning a historic European indoor silver medal in front of a rapturous crowd in Glasgow, it was not a question of if, but when Niamh Emerson would rise to the summit of the world multi-events.
Finishing behind only Katarina Johnson-Thompson, who was on her way to two world pentathlon titles, Emerson posted a pentathlon score of 4,731, setting personal bests in all five events, the best ever for a teenager worldwide. She won a Commonwealth bronze the previous summer before breaking Johnson-Thompson’s British under-20 record by 14 points as she claimed the world junior heptathlon title.
“She’s so impressive,” said Jessica Ennis-Hill of Britain’s next crowd-pleaser star. “He’ll be competing with Kat soon.”
It seemed that it was only a matter of time.
The first thing I do when Emerson answers the phone is apologize. A week after winning European indoor silver, I visited her for an interview in Loughborough, hearing her delight at receiving her idol Ennis-Hill’s phone number and witnessing her graciously wave back all the attention from a photo shoot in a busy athletics centre.
Embarrassingly, I haven’t spoken to him since that day in early 2019. I watched from the stands a few months later at Goetzis’ prestigious Hypo-Meeting, where he missed the second heptathlon event of the high jump, injuring his knee in the process. Then, like other track and field watchers, I followed his long absence from the sport from afar.
On the one hand, Emerson says, those days of teenage promise seem like yesterday. But it also feels like a lifetime ago. “I could never have predicted any of this,” he says now, reflecting on what happened next.
At the end of April of this year, Emerson participated in a low-level heptathlon in Brescia, Italy. His 5,799 points were one of the lowest in his career. But, most importantly, he did it. after more injuries than most athletes would ever endure, he finished the heptathlon for the first time in eight years.
“I was kind of convincing myself that I didn’t want to be a heptathlete anymore,” she admits. “And it was just because I couldn’t do it, so I would convince myself that I didn’t want to do it anyway. But obviously I did. It was all I wanted to do, so it was a bit of a fever dream to actually do it.”
A psychology graduate, Emerson has had plenty of time to reflect on the past decade.
“I’ve reflected a lot and changed the way I think about the past,” he says. “I believed I was too weak for my performance. But equally, I think if I did a little more gym and made some minor changes to my programming or preparation, I could have counteracted that.
“There were definite cracks. My knees weren’t shiny and there were cracks in terms of my mindset. I was all or nothing, which was great for the performance. But I was very, very young. I don’t really know, actually. I think it brought me a lot of trouble. I try not to think about it too much because it makes me so hard.
A period of half a dozen years takes Emerson barely five minutes to breeze through. In 2019, Gotsis underwent surgery for an initially torn patella tendon that took the better part of two years to recover from. He then broke a bone in his leg but was advised against surgery, tore the patella tendon in his other knee in an aborted heptathlon comeback in 2022, and eventually had to undergo surgery for a long-standing leg problem that never went away.
“At the end of 2024, I really fell in love with athletics,” says the now 27-year-old. “I was thinking about retirement. The rest of the time I thought it was part of my journey, but only then did I approach retirement. I was really happy with my life outside of athletics, but I didn’t love the athletic life.
“I just felt like I had unfinished business with the heptathlon. It’s me and I love it. So I continued. I thought I’d give it another year.”
After leaving his childhood coach David Feeney in 2021, Emerson joined former Ennis-Hill coach Tony Minichiello, with the Olympic champion serving as a mentor. But the relationship ended after just six weeks when Minichiello was fired from coaching pending an investigation into past offenses that later saw him banned for life for sexual misconduct, emotional abuse and bullying. Ennis-Hill called the allegations “shocking and sad”.
Emerson was then coached by Ashley Bryant through several years of major rehabilitation before making a last-ditch comeback from injury by joining Johnson-Thompson in Aston Moore’s Loughborough training squad.
At that point, many of his problems were as much mental as physical. For years, he booked holidays at the World Athletics Championships, deliberately not watching in order to “pretend they weren’t happening”. When he first joined Moore’s group, he was “too scared to even sprint.” He credits his return to international competition to “lots of therapy” and, in particular, the help of Johnson-Thompson.
“I lost all my ability,” he says. “I was in a training group with Katie, (long jumper) Jaz Sawyers, (sprinter and long jumper) Zach Skinner, these incredible athletes, and I couldn’t jump half their distance. I had lost all my athleticism.
“Kat just told me to copy her. So I literally did for a whole year. Honestly, I will be forever grateful to Kathy. She was an absolute angel. And so is Aston. The combination of the two of them was amazing. Obviously Aston wrote my program and coached me and I learned a lot from him. He’s a really great friend to train with Kat.”
Even once in a position to compete, another hurdle to overcome was getting invitations to events after missing so many events for so many years. When he received an invitation email a few weeks before the last competition in Brescia.
It was, he says, a mixed race in terms of results. A personal best of 14.10m, making up for disappointing efforts in the 100m hurdles and high jump; the last order is the last one he remains “a bit scared” of. But more important than her total points, the competition showed she was still capable of completing the heptathlon while building confidence in her body’s abilities.
The plan now is to compete in a hetathlon every month or so, building flexibility in each competition and improving his score each time. “I’m just going to keep trying to improve and master my craft,” he says. “Before the heptathlon in Italy, I was in the dark. Now that I’ve done one and have markers, I’m excited! Let’s go. I can get better.”
July’s Commonwealth Games remain a likely target, depending on how things pan out this summer, but the long-term goal is clearer. “I really want to go to the 2028 Olympics and then definitely the 2032 Olympics. I commit to it. I should literally be an Olympian. It’s something I should only do for my own sake.”
Although he trained full-time during his injury-ravaged years, he now also teaches Pilates and works as a mentor to talented young athletes. Kit sponsorship and funding for British Athletics has dried up in recent years, although it is financially supported by a Derby-based charity called MStart.
While his teenage success may be painful given all that followed, he insists he has “such fond memories” of those medal-winning years; “I like to look back. No one can ever take those performances away from me. They were incredible. I look back and see how impressive it was. I had no idea how good I was at the time. Only then did I realize how good I was.”
After losing eight years due to injury and uncertainty, just completing the heptathlon was significant enough. But Emerson believes it could still become much more.
“I feel like I’m not done,” she says. “Hopefully it was just a little break. And now I can go again.”
