Nafissatou Thiam victory 2017 World Championships in Athletics
Nafissatou "Nafi" Thiam (French pronunciation: ​[tʃam]; born 19 August 1994) is a Belgian athlete specializing in multi-event competition. She is a two-time Olympic gold medalist, winning the heptathlon event at the 2016 Rio and 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Thiam is the only Belgian athlete, male or female, to successfully defend an Olympic title and only the second woman after Jackie Joyner-Kersee to win back-to-back Olympic titles in the event.She won the gold medals at the 2017 and 2022 World Championships, and 2018 and 2022 European Championships as well as the silver medal at the 2019 World Championships. Thiam was voted IAAF World Female Athlete of the Year in 2017. She was a Belgian flag bearer at the opening ceremony of the 2020 Tokyo Games.
In May 2017, at the Hypo-Meeting in Götzis, Austria, Thiam became only the fourth woman to break the heptathlon 7000-point barrier. In March 2023, at the European Indoor Championships, on her way to the record third European pentathlon title, she broke the world record set in 2012 at the same Ataköy Arena by Ukraine’s Nataliya Dobrynska, totalling a score of 5055 points (the record was also held for ~six seconds by Adrianna Sułek who finished first the 800 m run). In doing so, Thiam became the first ever Belgian woman to set an official athletics world record (indoor or outdoor).As of March 2023, Thiam holds the Belgian records in the heptathlon and pentathlon, javelin and long jump (out and indoors). She holds the world record for the high jump discipline within the heptathlon competition, set in 2019.On 13 August 2016, Thiam won the gold medal for the heptathlon at the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro with a score of 6810 points, achieving personal best marks in five of the seven disciplines and defeating reigning Olympic and world champion Jessica Ennis-Hill of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. At 21-years-old, she was the youngest Olympic heptathlon gold medalist in history. She was elected Belgian flag bearer at the Olympic closing ceremony.On 3 March 2017, Thiam won the pentathlon at the 2017 European Indoor Championships in Belgrade with a total of 4870 points.On 28 May 2017, she won the heptathlon at the Hypo-Meeting in Götzis, Austria with a score of 7013 points, again achieving personal best scores in five of the seven disciplines, making her the fourth woman to score 7000 points or higher in competition. As of July 2017, she was third on the world all-time list behind Jackie Joyner-Kersee of USA and Sweden's Carolina Klüft. Her 59.32m javelin throw in Götzis broke the Belgian record for the women's individual event.On 6 August 2017, Thiam went into the World Championships in Athletics in London as hot favorite and won the heptathlon world title, becoming the first Belgian to win a World Athletics Championship gold medal.
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