Nafi Thiam looks worried. Katarina Johnson-Thompson looks worried. It’s a little after 8.30pm and the final race of the heptathlon is about to start, but really these are largely incidental details. There is a pretty good chance that at any randomly chosen moment in their week, Thiam and Johnson-Thompson can be found mid‑frown, wearing the grave and harried expression of someone constantly fretting that they’ve left the front door unlocked.
Perhaps this is simply the heptathlete’s condition. There are never enough training hours in the day. There is always something that needs fixing, some injury niggle that won’t go away. The heptathlete cannot strut their way around the arena, strike a pose for the cameras, ease down towards the end of their heat. Every second, every fraction of that second, every last joule of energy in their body, needs to be directed towards those seven gruelling events, and the margins that decide them.
