The combined events athlete who produced fireworks as a teenager but has been burnt by years of injury and ill-fortune, talks to Ben Bloom about being firmly on the comeback trail and why she has refused to give up on the heptathlon.

Back in 2019, after winning an historic European indoor silver medal in front of a rapturous Glasgow crowd, the question was not if, but when, Niamh Emerson would ascend the global multi-events summit. 

Finishing behind only Katarina Johnson-Thompson – who was on a path to two world heptathlon titles – Emerson recorded a pentathlon points tally of 4731, setting personal bests in all five disciplines to register the best ever score by a teenager globally. The previous summer, she had won Commonwealth bronze, before coming within 14 points of Johnson-Thompson’s British Under-20 record when claiming the world junior heptathlon title.

“She’s so impressive,” said Jessica Ennis-Hill of Britain’s next multi-events star-in-waiting. “She’s going to be rivalling Kat soon.”

It seemed only a matter of time.

The first thing I do when Emerson answers the phone is offer an apology. A week after that European indoor silver medal win, I had visited her in Loughborough for an interview, hearing her joy at getting her idol Ennis-Hill’s phone number, and witnessing her endearingly recoil at all the attention of a photoshoot inside a busy athletics centre.

Embarrassingly, I have not spoken to her since that day in early 2019. I watched from the stands at the prestigious Hypo-Meeting in Götzis a couple of months later, where she got no further than the second heptathlon discipline of the high jump, suffering a knee injury in the process. Then, like most other athletics observers, I followed her prolonged absence from the sport from afar.

On the one hand, says Emerson, those days of teenage promise seem like yesterday. But it also feels like a lifetime ago. “I could never have foreseen any of this,” she says now, reflecting on what came next.

At the end of April this year, Emerson competed at a low-key heptathlon in Brescia, Italy. Her score of 5799 was one of the lowest of her career. But, more importantly, she had done it – after more injury torment than most sportspeople would ever endure, she had finished a heptathlon for the first time in eight years.

“I’d kind of convinced myself that I didn’t want to be a heptathlete any more,” she admits. “And it was just because I couldn’t manage to pull it off, so I’d convince myself that I didn’t want to do it anyway. But obviously I did. It’s all I wanted to do, so actually doing it was a little bit of a fever dream.”

Psychology graduate Emerson has had plenty of time to consider the past decade – the soaring highs of her teenage years and the litany of physical issues that followed.

“I’ve reflected a lot, and I’ve changed what I think about the past,” she says. “I used to believe that I was too weak for my output. But, equally, I think if I’d have just done a little bit more gym and made some slight changes in my programming or prep, I could have counteracted that.

“There were cracks, for definite. My knees weren’t brilliant, and there were cracks in terms of my mindset. I was all or nothing, which was brilliant for performance. But I was very, very young. I don’t really know, in truth. I think I got very flipping unlucky. I try not to think about it too much because it does make me quite sad. I really tried my hardest the whole time.”

A period of half a dozen years takes Emerson barely five minutes to breeze through. There was the surgery on that initial torn patella tendon from Götzis in 2019, which took the best part of two years to recover from. Then she broke a bone in her foot – but was advised against surgery – tore the patella tendon in her other knee, tore her hamstring attempting an aborted heptathlon comeback in 2022, and eventually had to undergo an operation on the lingering foot problem that had never gone away.

“At the end of 2024 I had really fallen out of love with athletics,” says the now 27-year-old. “I was considering retiring very, very strongly. The rest of the time I thought it was just part of my journey, but it was only then that I came close to retiring. I was really happy with my life outside of athletics, but wasn’t loving life in athletics.

“I just felt I had such unfinished business with the heptathlon. It is me, and I love it. So I carried on. I thought I’d give it one more year.”

After leaving her childhood coach David Feeney in 2021, Emerson had joined Ennis-Hill’s former coach Toni Minichiello, with the Olympic champion serving as mentor. But the relationship ended after just six weeks when Minichiello was suspended from coaching, pending an investigation into past offences that subsequently saw him banned for life for engaging in sexually inappropriate behaviour, emotional abuse and bullying. Ennis-Hill called the allegations “shocking and upsetting”.

Emerson was then coached by Ashley Bryant during a couple of years of primarily rehabilitation, until committing to one final attempt at returning from injury by joining up with Johnson-Thompson in Aston Moore’s Loughborough-based training group.

By that point, many of her problems were as much mental as they were physical. For years she had booked holidays during global athletics competitions, intentionally not watching so she could “pretend they weren’t happening”. When she first joined Moore’s group she was “too scared to even sprint”. She credits her international competition return to “a lot of therapy” and, specifically, Johnson-Thompson’s help.

“I’d lost all my ability,” she says. “I was in a training group with Kat, [long jumper] Jaz Sawyers, [para sprinter and long jumper] Zak Skinner, these incredible athletes, and I couldn’t even jump half the distance of them. I’d lost all my athleticism.

“Kat just told me to copy her. So I literally did for a whole year. Honestly, I will be forever grateful to Kat. She has been an absolute angel. And Aston as well. The combination of the two of them has been amazing. Obviously Aston has written my programme and coached me, and I’ve learned so much from him. Training with Kat is amazing. She’s such a nice person and a really good friend.”

Even once in a position to compete, another hurdle to overcome was gaining invitations to events, having been absent from multi-events for so many years. When an invitation email arrived a few weeks before the recent Brescia competition, she scrapped plans to join her training group’s camp in Turkey and embarked on a step into the unknown.

It was, she says, a mixed competition from a results standpoint. A shot put personal best of 14.10m compensated for disappointing efforts in the 100m hurdles and high jump – the latter discipline is the final one that she remains “a little bit scared of”. But, more important than her total points tally, the competition proved she was still capable of completing a heptathlon, while reinforcing trust in her body’s ability.

The plan now is to contest a heptathlon every month or so, building resilience with each competition and bettering her score each time. “I’ll just keep trying to improve now and master my craft,” she says. “Before the heptathlon in Italy, I was in the dark. Now I’ve done one and I have markers, I’m excited. Let’s go. I can get better.”

July’s Commonwealth Games remain a possible target depending on how things progress this summer, but the long-term goal is clearer: “I really want to go to the 2028 Olympics and then definitely the one after in 2032. I’m committing myself to it. I’ve literally got to be an Olympian. That’s something I have to do, just for my own sanity.”

Although she trained full-time during her injury-ravaged years, she now also teaches pilates and works as a mentor to talented young athletes. Kit sponsorship and UK Athletics funding dried up in recent years, although she has been financially supported by a Derby-based charity called MStart.

While her teenage success could be painful to relive given everything that has followed, she insists she has “such fond memories” of those medal-winning years: “I love looking back. No one can ever take those performances away from me. They were incredible. I look back and see how impressive it was. I had no idea how good I was back then. It’s only this year that I realise what I did.”

After eight years lost to injury and uncertainty, simply completing a heptathlon felt significant enough. But Emerson believes it can yet become much more than that.

“I feel like I’m not done,” she says. “Hopefully that was just a little bit of a break. And now I can go again.”