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Jessica Ennis-Hill and Andy Hill are childhood sweethearts (Image: Getty)
There is more to Jessica Ennis-Hill than the Olympic gold medal she won on Super Saturday. One of the stars of the London 2012 Olympic Games has been retired since 2016, yet she and her husband Andy Hill are still keeping themselves busy.
The 38-year-old has been working as a pundit and analyst for the BBC over the course of the games in Paris. While she is unquestionably the most famous in her household, Ennis-Hill and her other half are the perfect team.
They have accumulated a more than healthy net worth which has seen her become one of the wealthiest British Olympians of all time. While her life has been a huge success story, she found out about the struggles her ancestors faced in their lives in an extraordinary episode of the BBC's genealogy series 'Who Do You Think You Are?' Express Sport takes a look at the British hero's business adventures, marriage and family history.
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Watch the 2024 Olympic Games with Discovery+
Discovery+ is the new home of the Olympics. The streamer is set to broadcast 3,800 hours of sport live from Paris.
Sports fans can get Discovery+ for £3.99 a month until the end of 2024 via Amazon Prime's video channels. This also comes with an Amazon Prime 30-day free trial.
Net worth
When she was in the early stages of her career, Ennis-Hill formed 'Jessica Ennis Limited'. According to companycheck.co.uk, as of 2023, her company has amassed a net worth of around £5million.
In 2016, she was tipped to become a television pundit and star due to her demeanour in front of the camera and her previous career. In a 2016 interview with the Daily Mail Rupert Prett, the director of Mongoose Sports and Entertainment, said: "She's got it all.
"She's had the fantastic career, is very media friendly, is now a mum and can take her off-track career to another level."
As well as appearing on the television sofas for the games in Paris, Ennis-Hill also worked for the BBC at the last Olympics in Tokyo. Considering her experience and broadcastability, it will not be the last time she is invited to give her opinion on the games.
As well as her BBC role, Ennis-Hill is also an Adidas & Vitality Ambassador, a Women’s Health Champion and an entrepreneur, with several appsfocusing on women's health.
Jessica Ennis-Hill is still one of Great Britain's most celebrated Olympians (Image: Getty)
Her loving husband
Ennis-Hill and husband Andy are childhood sweethearts. They first met each other when they were pupils at King Ecgbert School in Dore. Hill is a construction site manager, who got down on one knee on Christmas Eve in 2010.
Instead of taking her to Paris or another romantic city, he instead chose a more intimate setting to pop the question - in their own home in Sheffield. In an interview with Hello magazine at the time, Ennis-Hill said: "He was saying all these lovely things. I thought, 'It really sounds like he's going to propose, but he can't be'.
"Then he got the ring out of his pocket. It was an amazing feeling." Andy added: "You had a little tear in your eye. We've always talked about it and it just felt like the time was right. Christmas is quite special for me and Jess."
They would go on to tie the knot in May 2013 at St Michael and All Angels church, located in the Peak District village of Hathersage.
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The couple have been married for around 11 years (Image: Getty)
Dark family history
When Ennis-Hill took part in a recent episode of 'Who Do You Think You Are?' she was expecting to find other athletics stars in her family tree. What she instead found was heartbreaking. She would be taken to a sugar plantation in Jamaica, where her great-great-great-great-grandfather had been enslaved.
There was a happy ending, as she learned that he saved up £160, a massive sum of money in the 1700s to purchase the land from his slave master. A teary-eyed Ennis-Hill said: “It looked so beautiful, the house and the immaculate gardens, but then there’s this awful feeling of history there."
The heartbreak did not end there. She learned that her great-great-grandmother Maud mysteriously disappeared all the way back in 1919, having appeared to abandon her young children. What actually happened was even more shocking.
She was committed to a psychiatric hospital for the rest of her life. To make things even worse, when her 11-year-old daughter died, nobody even told her. When she learned about the news, Ennis-Hill, who is a mother of two, said: "What if I was whisked off to an asylum and I never saw my kids again and my young daughter died while I was in there, and nobody told me?" She added that she "couldn't imagine" the trauma she'd feel.
