How Nafi Thiam made history in 2024

For Belgium, 2024 was a year of unforgettable sporting moments. Belga takes a closer look at five Belgian athletes who surpassed all expectations and made their mark on the global stage. Today, we focus on heptathlete Nafi Thiam.

Nafi Thiam's gold medal at the Paris Olympics was seen as a foregone conclusion in Belgium. The 30-year-old is one of the best athletes in the country's history and has dominated the heptathlon for the best part of a decade.

Her winning streak began at the 2016 Rio Olympics, where she became the youngest ever winner of the Olympic heptathlon. Since then, with the exception of a runner-up finish at the 2019 World Championships, she has won every international championship in which she has competed. This has resulted in three European titles, three world titles and another gold medal at Tokyo 2020.

Mental struggles

But Thiam's success has come with many ups and downs, and she has struggled mentally with the pressure of elite sport and the expectations of the public. The Tokyo Olympics were particularly difficult for her, even after winning gold.

"After Tokyo I was empty, I wanted to go home as soon as possible and not talk to anyone," she told Sporza in an interview this year. "I said to myself: it's a shame to have worked so hard, sacrificed everything, and then just be unhappy."

"It's a shame to have worked so hard, sacrificed everything, and then just be unhappy"

So she took a bold decision. In 2022, she parted company with coach Roger Lespagnard, with whom she had worked since 2008. The news came as a surprise to many as the duo had achieved so much together, but Thiam knew she had to reinvent herself if she wanted to achieve more.

"You have to make tough decisions, hard decisions," she told CNN in an interview. “If you want to do something exceptional, you have to think out of the box and probably not do what everybody else is doing.”

"If you want to do something exceptional, you have to think out of the box"

Renewal

She hired new staff, including a new coach, Michael Van der Plaetsen, so that she could train in better conditions and with better medical support. This was something her previous entourage had neglected, resulting in injuries that dragged on for years.

The change worked. Thiam was able to let go of the pressure and rediscover the joy of competing. In Paris, she won her third consecutive Olympic gold medal.

This makes Thiam only the second woman in athletics to win three consecutive Olympic titles in the same discipline, and the first to do so in the heptathlon. Only Poland's Anita Wlodarczyk has achieved the same feat, winning three consecutive gold medals in the hammer throw between 2012 and 2021.

But Thiam says she does not think about her place in history when she reflects on her Olympic achievements. "I don't look at it that way," she said after her victory in Paris. “I think mostly of the sacrifices I made, the efforts, the pain, the doubts. And I think about the people who believed me and helped me. This is the result of that.”

More to come

Paris might have been Thiam's last Olympic appearance. A new generation of heptathletes is entering the scene, and Thiam will be 34 when the next Olympics are held in Los Angeles. But that does not mean she is hanging up her spikes just yet.

"I'm sure I can do better," she told CNN. “I feel like there is some unfinished business, and I think to be really able to walk away from the sport in peace, I have to go as far as I can to try everything before being done.”

^{© PHOTO JON OLAV NESVOLD}