Young Hurdler Was Destined For Olympic Glory – But A Video Of Her Warm-Up Changed Everything

Meet Michelle Jenneke. She’s a champion sprint hurdler, but that’s not the reason her picture went viral all over the internet a few years ago. Before a race the young Australian did something that the audience hadn’t seen before and it was caught by a video camera. The footage soon proved compelling to an audience across the globe, and the whole episode set in train a series of events that no one could have predicted...

Athletes doing creative moves in front of spectators is nothing new, of course. Sportspeople do it all the time to win over fans and pump up the crowds. But when she was filmed Jenneke wasn’t actually trying to do either of those things: she was simply trying to prepare herself for the race ahead. Neither she nor anyone else had any idea of what was about to happen.

Jenneke had been doing that particular warm-up since 2009, but no-one had noticed before. Yet at the World Junior Championships in 2012 cameras were there, and they caught everything. Before she had time to catch her breath, Jenneke had gone viral around the globe. Countless people suddenly knew her name.

As many people in the world have discovered for good or ill, if a video of you goes viral there’s not really an awful lot you can do. You can try and take it down of course, but that generally results in more and more people becoming aware of it. That’s the situation in which Jenneke unexpectedly found herself.

Of course, there are some bonuses to having a video go viral. In the case of Jenneke the video made her famous, granted her some newfound fame as an internet meme, and resulted in her becoming a sex symbol, for a little while at least. But was that really what she wanted for her career?