Katarina Johnson-Thompson: The World’s Most Overqualified Survivor
Katarina Johnson-Thompson and the Existential Burden of Being Good at Too Many Things
By Our Correspondent, still jet-lagged from a connecting flight that smelled of duty-free gin and surrender
LONDON—While the rest of us were perfecting the art of opening a bag of crisps with one hand and doom-scrolling with the other, Katarina Johnson-Thompson (KJT to her friends, sponsors, and the dwindling number of journalists who can spell “heptathlon” without autocorrect) was busy reminding the planet that the human body can, in fact, be weaponised into a Swiss-army knife of biomechanical precision.
On a drizzly evening at the World Championships in Budapest, the Liverpudlian carved her name into the scoreboard—1,000-plus points ahead of the nearest rival—like someone etching “I was here” into the desk of global athletics before the next budget cut wipes the subject entirely. The victory was Britain’s first heptathlon gold since the days when Brexit was still a spelling-bee punchline, and it landed with the dull thud of a nation that isn’t quite sure whether to celebrate or apologise for the inconvenience.
Internationally, the triumph reads less like a feel-good sidebar and more like a geopolitical memo. With Russia’s athletics federation still exiled to the naughty step and the United States reduced to exporting 100-metre dopers faster than TikTok trends, the heptathlon—an event practically designed by a committee of sadists—has become a rare, ungoverned space where you can still win by being merely excellent at seven things instead of superhuman at one. Johnson-Thompson’s mastery of the 100m hurdles, high jump, shot put, 200m, long jump, javelin, and 800m is, in effect, a Brexit in reverse: a surprise re-engagement with the multilateral world, one gruelling discipline at a time.
Yet the broader significance lies beyond the podium. Consider the optics: a mixed-race woman from a city that governments habitually use as a cautionary tale about austerity outperforms nation-states that spend more on a single sports ministry than Britain allocates to school lunches. The symbolism is almost too on-the-nose, like commissioning a mural titled “Irony” and then watching it get gentrified.
For the global audience, KJT’s narrative arc offers a crash course in modern resilience. There was the Achilles rupture in Tokyo, the kind of injury that usually comes with a complimentary existential crisis; the pandemic that turned training facilities into pop-up morgues; and the lingering suspicion that Nike’s marketing department keeps a resurrection script on standby. She resurrected anyway, because sport—like capitalism—finds a way. Her comeback is therefore packaged for international consumption as proof that the West can still manufacture something other than inflation and podcasts.
Still, one detects a whiff of dystopian absurdity. While Johnson-Thompson was compiling enough points to qualify for a modest mortgage, temperatures in Budapest flirted with 40°C, a figure that doubles as both a weather forecast and a metaphor for the planet’s prognosis. Climate change, war, and the collapse of public infrastructure are the new paralympic events nobody asked for, yet here we are, cheering a woman for throwing a spear farther than her competitors as if that will somehow deflect the next heat dome.
And then there’s the sponsorship calculus. Athletics’ governing body can barely fund a drug test without a GoFundMe, but KJT’s smile is currently being leveraged to sell everything from electrolyte water to “performance” mascara—because nothing says elite sport like the fear of running mascara during an 800m death-jog. The irony, of course, is that the heptathlon is essentially a week-long job interview for the gig economy: do seven different tasks, get paid for one, and don’t forget to thank the brand that let you borrow a javelin.
In the end, Johnson-Thompson’s victory is both beacon and mirage. It tells every schoolkid from Lagos to Liverpool that multi-skilled excellence still matters, while quietly neglecting to mention the part about specialised mediocrity paying the bills. It offers a fleeting illusion that the world values breadth over brand, stamina over spin. And it allows the United Kingdom—temporarily—to bask in the afterglow of relevance, like a fading empire clutching a participation trophy carved from endangered hardwood.
She will fly home, rest, and then resume the thankless circuit of stadiums named after airlines that no longer exist. The rest of us will return to our single-event lives—scroll, like, resent—having momentarily witnessed what it looks like when a human refuses to choose just one thing to fail at. For that alone, Katarina Johnson-Thompson deserves whatever passes for applause these days: a trending hashtag, a commemorative stamp, perhaps even a functioning National Health Service. Don’t hold your breath on the last one; some contests are rigged even before the starting gun.
