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Great Lives from History: American Women

Jackie Joyner-Kersee

by Mark Stanbrough, Micah L. Issitt

Track-and-field athlete

Joyner-Kersee was one of the greatest female athletes of all time. She won three gold, one silver, and two bronze medals over four consecutive Olympic Games, competing in the long jump and heptathlon. She set world and Olympic records in both events.

Born: March 3, 1962

Area of Achievement: Sports: basketball, Sports: Olympics, Sports: track and field

Early Life

Jackie Joyner-Kersee was born March 3, 1962, in East St. Louis, Illinois, one of four children born to Al and Mary Joyner. She was named after First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. The Joyner children grew up in a dangerous neighborhood, witnessing murder and violence on the streets. Although she was surrounded by drugs and alcohol in her neighborhood, Joyner-Kersee stayed away from that path and excelled in the classroom. She began to show her promise as an athlete by long-jumping more than seventeen feet when she was only twelve years old. Joyner-Kersee also excelled in basketball, cross country, volleyball, and track and field at Lincoln High School in East St. Louis. Her performance on the basketball court drew the attention of college recruiters, especially when her team beat opponents by an average of more than fifty points per game in her senior year. Joyner-Kersee received a basketball scholarship to attend the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA).

At UCLA, Joyner-Kersee started at forward on the basketball team all four years. She also met track and field coach Bob Kersee, who would have a major impact on her life. When she was an eighteen-year-old freshman, Joyner-Kersee lost her mother to a rare form of meningitis. Although she was devastated, she returned to school and went on to earn a history degree and graduate in the top 10 percent of her class. In 1985, Joyner-Kersee was named the UCLA Athlete of the Year and won the Broderick Cup, awarded to the country's most outstanding female collegiate athlete.

Life's Work

Under Kersee's direction at UCLA, Joyner-Kersee came to specialize in the heptathlon. The heptathlon consists of seven track and field events conducted over two days. Day one consists of the 100-meter hurdles, high jump, shot put, and 200-meter dash. Day two comprises the long jump, javelin, and 800-meter run. Joyner-Kersee won the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) heptathlon two years in a row (1982 and 1983), as well as the 1982 U.S. Outdoor Championship. As Joyner-Kersee prepared to compete in the 1983 World Track and Field Championships in Helinski, Finland, she pulled a hamstring and was forced to withdraw. The hamstring bothered her throughout her career. She also received a diagnosis of asthma, for which she required medication.

In the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, Joyner-Kersee had the lead in the heptathlon going into the final event. However, her hamstring injury slowed her down, and her 800-meter time was less than a second too slow to win. Glynis Nunn of Australia won the gold by a margin of five points. Joyner-Kersee's brother, Al Joyner, Jr., also competed in the 1984 Olympics, winning a gold medal in the triple jump.

After graduating from UCLA, Joyner-Kersee married Kersee, who continued to coach her. She developed into one of the top heptathletes in the world, winning the 1986 Goodwill Games in Moscow and setting a world record with 7,148 points. That year, she won the Jesse Owens Award, given to the top performer in track and field. She won the award again in 1987 and tied the world record of 24 feet, 5" inches in the long jump. However, she also suffered her first major asthma attack. Her aversion to using medication allowed her asthma to worsen over the years, even forcing her to compete while wearing an allergen-filtering mask in 1993.

Brother and Sister Olympians

Track and field and Olympic success ran in the Joyner family. Jackie Joyner-Kersee and her brother. Al Joyner, Jr., both were Olympic gold medalists. Al went to college at Arkansas State University, where he won three National Collegiate Athletic Association championships in the triple jump. At the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Games, he became the first American in eighty years to win gold in the event. Joyner-Kersee won the silver medal in the heptathlon, making her and Al the first sibling teammates in United States history to medal at the same Olympics.

The Joyner family became even fater when Al married sprinter Florence Griffith. Griffith, later nicknamed FloJo, set world records in the 100 and 200 meters and won three gold medals at the 1988 Olympic Games. Joyner-Kersee, her brother, and her sister-in-law won a total of twelve Olympic medals and set world records in four events.

The 1988 Olympic Games were held in Seoul, South Korea, and Joyner-Kersee was in the prime of her career. She won gold medals in both the heptathlon and the long jump, and she matched the U.S. record for 100-meter hurdles. After reinjuring her hamstring at Tokyo's 1991 World Championships, Joyner-Kersee managed to repeat as gold medalist in the heptathlon and won a bronze medal in the long jump at the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona, Spain.

At the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, Georgia, Joyner-Kersee was forced to withdraw from the heptathlon because of her nagging hamstring injury, but she still won the bronze in the long jump. After the Games, Joyner-Kersee tried to return to her basketball roots, joining the Richmond Rage of the newly formed all-female American Basketball League (ABL). However, she played in only seventeen games, and the ABL was quickly eclipsed by the Women's National Basketball Association.

The 1998 Goodwill Games, held in New York City, marked the end of Joyner-Kersee's professional athletic career. She turned in an outstanding performance in the 800 meters, the final event of the grueling heptathlon, and won the competition. Her 7,291 points set a world record, breaking her own record set in 1986. Joyner-Kersee competed in the 2000 Olympic Trials, coming in sixth place in the long jump. In honor of her accomplishments, the Jesse Owens Award from the US track and field organization for female athletes was renamed the Jackie Joyner-Kersee Award.

Significance

Joyner-Kersee was one of the best all-around female athletes of all time. In 2000, she was ranked 1st place in Sports Illustrated's list of the top female athletes in history She ended her career having won twenty-five of the thirty-six multi-event competitions she entered. She overcame personal adversity, including her mother's sudden death and her own health problems, to become a symbol of strength, courage, and perseverance. Joyner-Kersee won three gold, one silver, and two bronze medals over four Olympic Games. She set world and Olympic records in the heptathlon and long jump. After her career ended, Joyner-Kersee continued to contribute to the sport by supporting the development of young athletes, particularly in her hometown of East St. Louis.

Citation Types

Type

Format

MLA 9th

Stanbrough, Mark, and Micah L. Issitt. "Jackie Joyner-Kersee." Great Lives from History: American Women, edited by Mary K. Trigg, Salem Press, 2016. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=GLHW_0251.

APA 7th

Stanbrough, M., & Issitt, M. L. (2016). Jackie Joyner-Kersee. In M. K. Trigg (Ed.), Great Lives from History: American Women. Salem Press. online.salempress.com.

CMOS 17th

Stanbrough, Mark and Issitt, Micah L. "Jackie Joyner-Kersee." Edited by Mary K. Trigg. Great Lives from History: American Women. Hackensack: Salem Press, 2016. Accessed September 17, 2025. online.salempress.com.

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