Carolina Klüft biography
Carolina Klüft, in full Carolina Evelyn Klüft, (born February 2, 1983, Sandhult, Sweden), Swedish track-and-field athlete who received a gold medal within the heptathlon on the Athens 2004 Olympic Games.
Her father, Johnny Klüft, was a Swedish first-division soccer (soccer) participant, and her mom, Ingalill Ahlm Klüft, was an extended jumper. Carolina, the second of 4 daughters, identified to her followers as “Carro,” adopted in her household’s athletic footsteps. In 1995, at age 12, she positioned second in her first championship multi-event, a youth track-and-field triathlon, and she or he didn't lose one other multi-event till May 1999.
She received world junior heptathlon titles in 2000 and 2002 and within the second of these victories broke a world junior file that had stood because the 12 months she was born. When Klüft received a gold medal on the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, her 517-point margin of victory over Lithuanian silver medalist Austra Skujyte was better than Skujyte’s margin over the Twenty fifth-place competitor. In 2005 Klüft, then aged 22, grew to become the youngest athlete ever to have received the “grand slam” of the 5 track-and-field championship titles out there to Europeans: the Olympics plus each the indoor and the outside International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF) world championships and European championships. She was troubled by a hamstring harm in 2006 but nonetheless managed to repeat as gold medalist on the European outside championships, held in Gothenburg, Sweden. By the tip of 2007 Klüft had contested a career-total 45 multi-events (indoors and outdoor) and had misplaced solely 6, her final loss coming in 2002 in an indoor European Cup pentathlon. In the 293 element occasions of those 45 competitions, she had failed to complete only one: in 2000 on the Swedish junior championships, when she deserted the heptathlon-concluding 800-metre run however nonetheless completed with sufficient factors to safe an age-18-and-under nationwide title.
Klüft additionally was an achieved lengthy jumper, with a private better of 6.97 metres (22 toes 101/2 inches) set in 2004, the identical 12 months she received the bronze medal in that occasion on the world indoor championships.
In 2007 Klüft received a file third consecutive IAAF world championships title within the heptathlon, with a rating of seven,032 factors, the second highest in historical past. Her tally, a 31-point enchancment on her earlier private greatest, was the very best in 18 years and vaulted the then 24-year-old Swede previous Larisa Nikitina of the previous Soviet Union on the all-time checklist. Only world-record holder Jackie Joyner-Kersee of the United States had scored greater. Although Joyner-Kersee’s heptathlon world file, set in 1988, loomed simply 259 factors from her grasp on the finish of 2007, Klüft indicated that she would flip her consideration full-time to the lengthy bounce in future seasons. She did, nevertheless, compete in each the lengthy bounce and the triple bounce within the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, though she didn't win any medals. A hamstring harm stored Klüft out of the 2009 world championships, and she or he completed fifth within the heptathlon on the 2011 world championships. Another hamstring harm prevented her from taking part within the London 2012 Olympic Games, and she or he retired in September 2012.