Kelly Sotherton
Born on 13rd of November 1976
Kelly Sotherton was born in Newport on the Isle of Wight. While still a teenager, she represented Hampshire in netball and in athletics she won two English Schools' championships in the heptathlon discipline. One championship came as an Intermediate in 1992 and another at Senior level two years later. In 1995 she won the AAA Under 20 title and went on to make her Junior international debut that year.
1997 saw Sotherton raise her game with a personal best of 5513 points in heptathlon. She improved her long jump best to 6.10m (and a wind-assisted 6.16m). The following winter she earned a silver medal in the AAA Indoor 400m but then a knee injury kept her out of her best form until 2000. Her senior British team debut came in 2002 with a 7th place finish at the Manchester Commonwealth Games..
Her indoor performances in 2003 brought her another AAA title in the Pentathlon and a Heptathlon personal best followed in Gotzis. The European Cup for Combined Events was her platform for a major breakthrough. A spell training in the US laid the foundations for a successful summer in 2004; in Tallinn she broke 6000 points barrier and qualified for National Lottery funding when she recorded a score of 6059.
She beat her own heptathlon best score in Gotzis in May 2004 with a score of 6406 points, setting personal bests in five of the seven disciplines.
A bronze medal came at her first Olympic Games at Athens 2004. Her javelin performance lost her ground and left her 11 points short of the silver medal won by Lithuania's Austra Skujyte. In 2005 she claimed 5th at the IAAF World Championships with a lifetime best in the 800m. Her first major gold medal was won at the 2006 Commonwealth Games with a total of 6396 points, despite another disappointing Javelin performance. Sotherton took a heptathlon bronze medal at the 2007 World Championships in Osaka, Japan.
In order to train with 2000 Olympic heptathlon champion Denise Lewis, Sotherton relocated to Midlands and now resides in Birmingham. She is a member of Birchfield Harriers athletics club.
Sotherton was selected to represent Team GB in the Beijing Olympic games of 2008.
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