Sports
Why Jade O’Dowda is part of the London 2012 legacy
Heptathlete has drawn inspiration from Jessica Ennis-Hill plus current training partner Katarina Johnson-Thompson, writes Stuart Weir.
Remember Super Saturday at the 2012 London Olympics, when three British athletes – Jess Ennis, Greg Rutherford and Mo Farah – won gold medals in the space of just 45 minutes? A 12-year-old girl in Oxford could not take her eyes off the TV screen. Fast forward 12 years and that Kidlington girl was in the Paris Olympic Stadium but this time she was competing. She describes herself as “part of the 2012 legacy”.
Jade O’Dowda was so smitten by athletics that she asked her parents if she could have a try. She started going to City of Oxford two evenings a week and found it fun. She recalls being “part of a group of children doing about four events every night with a bit of running at the end just to tire you out”.
She recalls the Oxford City chairman telling her parents that they were worried about her because no matter how much they asked her to do, they never seemed able to tire her!
Oxford City was really important to her development as was meeting Marcia Marriott, who talked to her about heptathlon. And as Ennis had been her inspiration, it seemed a natural progression to start heptathlon.
O’Dowda adds that as the junior programme involved a bit of hight and long jump throwing and running, all of which she enjoyed, heptathlon was an obvious choice.
Her first recorded competitions were in 2012 – an 800m and a long jump. By 2013 she was attempting and winning a pentathlon. By 2017 she was competing the World Under-20 Championships.
After school she took a degree in geography and a master’s in international relations in Sheffield, linking up with current coach, John Lane. After Uni she became a professional athlete, as she put it: “I think 12-year-old me would have never have thought that she’d be able to make money from it.”
From then on it was steady progress:
2022: Commonwealth Games bronze, European Championship 7th
2024: Olympic Games 10th, European Championship 7th
2025: European Indoors 4th, World Champs 8th
Twelve years after being inspired by the London Olympics, she found herself in the Paris Olympics. “It was incredible, quite daunting walking out for hurdles (her first event),” she said. “I hadn’t gone to the stadium beforehand and I remember being stood in the tunnel before my hurdles race and then I walked out and I think my mouth just dropped.
“I felt like I was in the bottom of this cauldron with loads of people staring at me. And yeah, I just remember looking around and thinking, how the hell has little Jade got here?”
To finish 10th in the Olympics left her with mixed feelings: an amazing experience yet knowing that if she had not been injured for much of the year, she could have done better.
She describes 2025 as “a really good year” but there again there is a tinge of frustration. Fourth in the European Indoor pentathlon – so close to medal but not quite.
The final event is the 800m and she just needed to be a little faster for the medal. Winter injuries had left her short of 800m endurance training “and it showed,” she says, “it was frustrating because I know I’m capable of doing more and I’m a bit gutted that I wasn’t able to show it. It was like dangling a carrot in front that I just missed. As frustrated as I was, I was able to take a lot from it”.
She feels “very lucky” to have KJT as a team-mate, explaining: “It’s really cool. I guess selfishly, I’ve had a little bit of a front row seat to the past, two years. The way every year, however her year has gone, that she’s been able to come and show up and get a medal, especially in heptathlon is amazing.
“Doing it myself and knowing how hard it is, I think it does get a little bit underappreciated how every year, every year she’s turned up and she’s got us a medal. She’s definitely such an inspiration. When we’re competing, I have so much fun with her too, in between rounds, sometimes we’re laughing and joking in between events.
“So it’s nice to see, how she’s able to be so relaxed and fun, but still be such this fierce competitor. And I think I’m not saying by any means that, she nearly scored 7000 points and is a two-time world champion multi-global medallist, but I’m a little bit far off that now, but I think by seeing it with my own eyes, like literally right in front of me, it kind of makes it feel possible. So for selfish reasons, that’s the biggest thing, but also it’s just been really fun.”
O’Dowda is already into winter training and feeling confident for 2026, which is a big year for GB athletes with a World Indoors in Poland in March, a Commonwealth Games in Glasgow and European Championships in Birmingham.
The 2025 season is the first year for a few years that she has finished a season injury free and is therefore able to start winter training healthy, too.
