Junior career held in
Rieti, Italy Nafissatou Thiam was born in
Brussels to a Belgian mother and a Senegalese father. She started participating in athletics when she was seven years old, winning her first national age group titles in 2009, by which time she was already specializing in the
heptathlon. Her favorite athlete at the time was Swedish heptathlete
Carolina Klüft. At the
2011 World Youth Championships in Athletics in
Lille, France, Thiam finished fourth in the heptathlon with a total of 5366 points. Then, as a first-year junior, she finished 14th at the
2012 World Junior Championships in Athletics in the heptathlon with a total of 5384 points.
Carolina Klüft, who later became Olympic champion and triple world champion, had held the record since 2002 with 4535 points. In doing so Thiam became the first Belgian female athlete to break a world record. However, in March 2013, the record was not ratified due to a lack of anti-doping control on the day it was achieved. The testing took place the next day, which was beyond the deadline specified by the
IAAF, athletics' international governing body. On 18 July 2013, she won the gold medal in the heptathlon at the
European Junior Championships in
Rieti, Italy achieving a new Belgian record of 6298 points. At 21-years-old, she was the youngest Olympic heptathlon gold medalist in history. She was elected Belgian flag bearer at the Olympic closing ceremony. On 3 March 2017, Thiam won the pentathlon at the
2017 European Indoor Championships in
Belgrade with a total of 4870 points. On 2 October 2019, she went again into the
World Athletics Championships as world leader and favourite for gold, but was expected to face stronger competition than in 2017 from erstwhile rival and 2018 European runner-up, Great Britain's
Katarina Johnson-Thompson. In the event, Thiam succumbed to an elbow injury that hindered her javelin, while Johnson-Thompson recorded a huge personal best of 6981 points, a national record and the sixth highest competition score in history to win comfortably. Thiam's performance was still good enough for the silver medal. On 5 March 2021, she won the pentathlon at the
European Indoor Championships in
Toruń, Poland with a total of 4904 points. On 5 August 2021, at the postponed
2020 Tokyo Games, she successfully defended her Olympic title with a score of 6791 points. On 3 March 2023, at the
European Indoor Championships in
Istanbul, she broke the pentathlon world record set in the same
Ataköy Arena back in
2012 by Ukraine’s
Nataliya Dobrynska (5013 points), totalling a score of 5055 points. With her third European indoor title, Thiam became the most successful female pentathlete in history of this championships. Injury, however, thwarted her capacity to defend her World Championships title, and in her absence Johnson-Thompson won her own second World title. At the 2024 Paris Olympic game, for the first time in several years both Thiam and Johnson-Thompson reached the start line fit and healthy. Over the course of the two days, Thiam overcame an average high jump performance to retain once more her Olympic heptathlon title in a close contest, finishing 40 points ahead of her long-time rival who took silver. In doing so, she became the first athlete to win 3 consecutive Olympic gold medals in heptathlon. ==Training and personal life==