Jessica Ennis: Behind every Olympic hopeful is the coach who never stops worrying

Toni Minichiello is a creature of habit. By 9am each day, Jessica Ennis’s coach has driven the 25 minutes from his Sheffield home and is discussing tactics with London 2012’s poster girl at the English Institute of Sport.

After three or four hours of training, the pair break for lunch, but when the afternoon session finishes about 5pm, the 45-year-old still has work to do. As children from across the city pour into the building, he’s busy coaching the next generation of athletes and rarely finishes before 8pm.

Still, if Ennis does make the podium this summer, the hours spent trackside will have been more than worth it and whatever happens in London, it will be another chapter in the partnership which began 15 years ago at the City of Sheffield Athletics Club.

Spotting the kind of youngster who has the potential to make it on the world stage can be tricky, but when it came to Ennis, Minichiello is modest about the role he played in those early days.

“It was fairly simple to see that Jess had something special. When you put a load of kids together, one racing against the other, you can see which one is the quickest in their peer group. Beyond that, she’s always been tenacious, a tough little cookie and she really doesn’t like losing.”

Minichiello’s parents, originally from just outside Naples, came to England to find work and later moved to Sheffield where his father worked in the steelworks. Despite his Italian ancestry, he’s a South Yorkshireman through and through. Affable and direct he’s always happy to talk to the media and says he found himself as one of the country’s top athletics coaches more by accident than design.

“I’ve referred to it before as a case of last man standing, but that’s how it happened, I was being coached by a guy who was studying at the University of Sheffield and when he finished I took over the training group. It moved forward from there really. You work with people and they want to get better. You educate yourself. Like any parent looking after a football team, you get asked to volunteer and the next minute you’ve been doing it for 10 years.”

While Minichiello may not have started out with a grand plan, he has proved a natural at coaching at the highest level. While all eyes will be on Ennis when the Olympic heptathlon gets under way on August 3, he will be there in the background just as he always is. As the Games draw nearer, the pressure is undoubtedly building not just on Ennis, but the rest of Team GB and while some will thrive in that kind of environment, others will undoubtedly fail.

“There is always an element of luck and any athlete is fortunate if their skills and prowess happen to coincide with the four-year Olympic cycle. Being Olympic ready is a lot of hard work – it’s a minimum of 10 years in the making and I think a few people push too hard. This year I’ve seen a few people pushing desperately hard to make the Olympics and they’re still quite young. It’s not something I find comfortable.

“That way leads towards an injury or burnout. At the very least, mentally you’ve got a real downside to deal with if you don’t succeed. The truth is no one is ever absolutely ready, as a coach you’re a bit of a grumpy old man. You’re always looking saying, ‘I’m not quite happy with that’. So will I be completely happy when the Games start? Probably not.”

While the last few years have seen Ennis graduate to the top of her sport, it’s not been an entirely seamless rise. Four years ago Ennis withdrew from a competition in Austria complaining of pain in her right foot. A scan revealed she had suffered three stress fractures forcing her to miss the Beijing Games and threatening to end her career altogether.

It was 12 months before she could return to professional competition, during which time she had to change her entire long jump technique switching her take off leg from right to left. Winning her comeback event with a personal best score of 6,587 was a moment to savour, but neither of them have ever forgotten those dark days of four years ago.

“There is an adage that says ‘success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan’,” says Minichiello. “As a coach you have to turn that on its head because when athletes have had a bad competition that’s when they most need support.

“A lot of people get abandoned in failure, not in a nasty way, but because people don’t know what to say and don’t want to upset them. But they are already upset and you have to look at it as a problem and something to be fixed.”

Much of that refining of technique has been done at the EIS and Minichiello has always been a very vocal supporter of the work being done at the Sheffield centre of excellence.

“There aren’t better training facilities,” he says. “I’ve been up and down the country and I’ve seen what’s on offer. There are equally good facilities in London, but some of my colleagues down there have to travel an hour and a half to training. Even in rush hour it only takes Jess and I 25 minutes.

“Of course, I’m slightly biased, but Sheffield is a really good place to live. You’re at home and there’s family support. When I go to the supermarket, people come up and ask how things are going, but in a way which isn’t at all intrusive. I wouldn’t want to be anywhere else.”

However, having earned a reputation for saying it like it is, he also believes that if Sheffield is to produce a new generation of athletes like Ennis, a great deal more work is needed to be done.

“Here in Sheffield we have a lot of untapped talent and we need to build stronger links between sport and education. The London Olympics will give us a legacy in concrete, bricks and mortar, which is superb, but we need to look out for future talent. We need to be more than a city that’s striving to have sporting events; we need to be a city that has a huge health agenda. It is that combination of sport, activity and participation and I’m not talking about elite sports; there are a lot of kids who could just be more involved even if they don’t go onto compete at the highest level.

“We can find more talent and we can nurture it, but there needs to be investment at the grassroots. Unfortunately, clubs find attracting volunteers extremely difficult and the city needs to support that gap.”

Having worked closely with Ennis since she was 11-years-old, Minichiello knows exactly what it takes to be a world-beater, but he also knows that not every talented teenager can make the transfer as she did to the heptathlon.

“People often ask me how you can encourage young athletes to try other disciplines, but I’ve always said they shouldn’t specialise too soon. You see so many kids who are just middle distance runners, throwers or jumpers and that’s all they will ever be. It’s impossible to know whether someone has the makings of a heptathlete until they are 15 or 16 and the most important thing is that they enjoy sport, whatever that may be.”

With less than two months to go until Ennis takes her position on the 100m start line – the first of seven events over two days – much of Minichiello’s work has been done. However, aside from the odd game of local league basketball and a few trips to the driving range, his focus remains 100 per cent on Ennis.

“Sports people have an opportunity to switch off, but as a coach you don’t,” he says. “You’re always thinking about what’s coming up and how you’re going to take the training forward. There is the idea that athletes probably spend 10 years and 10,000 hours working, but for a coaching point of view it’s probably 10 years and 30,000 hours.”

Aside from the hours of training, Minichiello partnership with Ennis has also been a huge emotional investment. As a result he knows her better than most.

“What can I tell you, that you might not already know about Jess? Well, she used to play the trombone and as a kid she ate tripe. I’m not sure about the trombone, but I’m pretty sure she doesn’t eat tripe.”