Black History Month Project
Storyboard Text
- Jackie Joyner-Kersee showed great enthusiasm for athletics early on, and, as a teenager, she won the first of four consecutive National Junior Pentathlon championships. In high school she was a determined student and athlete, graduating near the top of her class and competing on the school’s volleyball, basketball, and track teams.
- As a junior, she set the Illinois high-school girls’ long jump record at 6.68 metres (20 feet 7.5 inches). Her high-school success led to a scholarship to theUniversity of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she initially focused on basketball and the long jump.
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- on July 7, 1986, Joyner-Kersee finally emerged as the dominant heptathlete, setting a world record (7,148 points) at the Goodwill Games in Moscow. Her score bettered the old record by 202 points, making her the first heptathlete to top 7,000 points.
- Joyner-Kersee set the heptathlon world record (7,291) for the fourth time while winning the gold medal at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul.
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- In her final Olympic appearance at the1996 Games in Atlanta, she earned a bronze medal in the long jump; a hamstring injury forced her to withdraw from the heptathlon.
- In 1988 she established the Jackie Joyner-Kersee Foundation, which sought to help at-risk children, especially those living in her hometown of East St. Louis, Illinois.
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