I did this for myself, says Ennis after new GB record

The 26-year-old from Sheffield can now turn her attention to copying Lewis by following a national record with Olympic gold, on home soil at the London Games.

“I don’t want to think about that yet, I just need to enjoy this moment and stay focused,” Ennis said. “I know I am in great shape and that I can build on it now.

“I’m so happy, I’m over the moon. The record is something that’s been at the back of my mind and I wanted to achieve but I didn’t want to put too much pressure on it. Now I have the record I am very very pleased.”

Ennis arrived in Austria to find herself bizarrely labelled “fat” by a senior figure at UK Athletics and having lost both her world titles in the space of seven months.

But the Yorkshirewoman hit back in brilliant style to record a third straight win at the Hypo Meeting with a new personal best of 6,906 points.

That was 75 more than the previous record of 6,831 set by Lewis in 2000, shortly before she won Olympic gold in Sydney, and makes Ennis only the eighth woman to score more than 6,900.

Russia’s Tatyana Chernova, who took Ennis’s world title in Daegu last year, was 132 points behind in second, with Olympic champion Nataliya Dobrynska a distant ninth almost 600 points adrift.

“They won’t want to go into London with a bad score, they will come back stronger, but so will I and I will have a big crowd with me,” Ennis added.

“There is definitely more to come, not hundreds and hundreds of points, little improvements, but I am 26 now and I have always said this is a good age.”

Ennis had been keen to play down the possibility of the record on Saturday evening, despite a personal best of 22.88secs in the 200m giving her a first-day total of 4,113 points, 33 ahead of her score at the European Championships in Barcelona in 2010 when she set her previous PB of 6,823.

That was perhaps understandable given that poor performances in the javelin and long jump cost her the world outdoor title in Daegu last year and world indoor crown in Istanbul in March respectively, but this time there was emphatically no second-day stumble.

In fact Ennis equalled her personal best of 6.51m in the long jump and then threw a personal best of 47.11m in the javelin, improving her previous mark by 40cm in the opening round and also producing consistent subsequent throws of 44.32m and 44.66m.

That left her needing to complete the 800m in a relatively pedestrian two minutes 14 seconds to break Lewis’s record, but she made absolutely certain by clocking 2:09.00, leading from the gun before just being beaten to the line by Chernova.

“I really wanted 6,900 points,” Ennis added. “Typically I thought I would just miss out on it but to have actually got it is brilliant.

“I wanted to do it for me, to prove to myself that I can do it, that I am capable of scoring a big score and that I am in good shape. That gives me the self-belief and the mental capacity going ahead, so that was really good for me.

“I did worry a bit (after Daegu and Istanbul), but I had to believe that I have all the components to make it work and make a big score. I have worked so hard over the past few weeks since the indoor season so to actually come here and see all that come together was brilliant.”

Ennis’s coach Toni Minichiello also believes there is more to come, but said: “It’s been an excellent two days. I’m really pleased.

“It shows she is in good shape and follows on from the shape she had indoors. It’s nice to do a British record indoors in Istanbul and then come outdoors and do another. We’ve kind of got the set, even though she lost the junior one recently, but you can’t have everything.”

One area Ennis will be looking to improve is in the high jump, an event in which she is the joint British record holder at 1.95m.

She only managed 1.85m here to follow a run of 12.81s in the 100m hurdles, but a solid 14.51m in the shot was followed by a brilliant run in the 200m which gave her a commanding lead of 221 points after the opening day.

Kelly Sotherton, meanwhile, has called time on her career two months short of what she had hoped would be a final hurrah at the London Olympics.

The 35-year-old heptathlete had an operation a little over a week ago to remove a piece of disc from her back and although she was told by her doctor she could be running again within six weeks, that does not give her enough time to reach the qualifying standard before the British team is picked.

Sotherton, who returned to the heptathlon last year after quitting it in favour of the 400m in 2010, was competing at the IAAF Combined Events Challenge in Italy earlier this month when she broke down in the 200m and said she knew immediately the injury was serious enough to end her dream.

Sotherton, a bronze medallist at Athens 2004, said she will now enjoy the Olympics as a fan, and will be supporting Ennis, insisting that the rivalry between the two multi-eventers had always been misunderstood.

“If Jess was American or French, it wouldn’t be so much of a bother but she’s British and she was taking my fans,” Sotherton said.

“Now I’m happy that she’s British.”