Nafi Thiam ahead of Brussels Diamond League 2022: “I’m not finished with heptathlon”

When Nafi Thiam won the European title in 2018, she reached a new dimension as an athlete. Her victory meant she was in possession of the three major athletics titles after her golds at the Olympic Games Rio 2016 and 2017 World Championships.

It was an outstanding achievement, particularly as she competes in the heptathlon, a discipline that requires you to perform seven different events over two days.

However, in 2022 she achieved the feat again and in only a year, after winning a second Olympic gold at Tokyo 2020 in 2021, before world and European titles in 2022.

Thiam returns home to compete in the long jump at the Brussels Diamond League 2022 on 2 September. It will represent a celebration in front of her home crowd just two weeks after winning the European title in Munich.

“I’m very proud of everything I achieved,” she told Olympics.com in an exclusive interview. “It was really hard to fight for them all, so I’m very proud and very grateful to be able to be Olympic, world and European champion again.”

Nafi Thiam: “Confident about the future”

Thiam can be even more proud of her achievements after some of the obstacles she has had to overcome in preparation for 2022. After winning Olympic gold in Japan, she took a break before resuming training. She had to deal with a number of injuries, including back pain that affected her mental wellbeing and doubts about whether she would be able to compete this northern hemisphere summer.

However, as her results testify, she continued to persevere, and the hard times she passed through have given her more confidence for the future.

“I’m not sure yet if it makes it more enjoyable that you have struggled so much,” she said, before adding: “However, for the future, it makes me confident about the fact I can overcome difficult things because I did it before.”

A world class high jumper who remains a heptathlete at heart

The Brussels-born athlete may have won everything there is to win - twice - but she hasn’t lost any love for heptathlon. One option could have been for her to concentrate on high jump, the event in which she has seen the best results out of the seven she specialises in.

At the European Championships in Munich, she sailed over 1.98m during the heptathlon, which was a championship record. It even beat the 1.95m Ukraine’s Yaroslava Mahuchikh jumped to win the high jump title.

Thiam has a personal best of 2.02m, which is just two centimetres less than the 2.04m it took for Mariya Lasitskene to win gold at Tokyo 2020. And while Thiam is capable of medalling in the high jump, she has set her sight elsewhere for now.

“It’s hard for me to think about specialising in the high or long jumo,” said Thiam. “I feel like I am not done with heptathlon, I didn’t go to the maximum.

“I really just want to see how far I can go and when I feel like ‘ok, I did everything I could in heptathlon’, maybe I'll do something else. But if I would leave for high jump now, I think I would have that taste of something unfinished. And that cannot be.”

Time for records

Thiam has the potential to become the first woman to win three Olympic golds in heptathlon and to out-do the USA’s Jackie Joyner-Kersee, who also holds the world record: 7,291 points, which she achieved when she won her first Olympic title at Seoul 1988. At Atlanta 1996, Joyner-Kersee also won bronze in the long jump event.

For now, Nafi's best total is 7,013 points, which she achieved in 2017. However, she proved she is once again in top form, hitting 6,947 points - her second-best mark ever - this summer in Oregon.

“My motivation was always to be the best I can be, and I feel I'm getting stronger and stronger than I was few years ago when I did my PB. So I know I am able to do a bigger total.

“It's very hard obviously to put everything together in heptathlon. So maybe I will never achieve that, but I have that hope. That's why I feel like I'm not finished with heptathlon.”

And is a world record within her sights?

“I'm not really thinking about the world record. I wish one day it could be really a realistic goal for me, but I don't think it is at the moment.

“I definitely think about the European record, though, because I want to beat my PB and I'm not too far from the European record.”

The mark she talks about hasn’t changed since 2007, when Sweden’s Carolina Kluft, the Olympic champion at Athens 2004, scored 7,032 points.

“I know I can do it, but all I can do is keep working and we'll see what happens.”

For someone who is considered a perfectionist (“my mum would definitely agree”) anything is possible.