Jackie Joyner-Kersee was the first woman to score 7,000 points in a heptathlon event (during the 1986 Goodwill Games). She was inspired to compete in multi-discipline events after seeing a 1975 television movie about "Babe" Didrikson.

Jacqueline Joyner was born in Wooster, Arkansas, and went to UAPB, where she starred in both track and basketball. She is the sister-in-law of the late Florence Griffith Joyner. Her brother, Al Joyner, is also an Olympic gold medalist, having won the Olympic triple jump in 1984. Sports Illustrated voted her the greatest female athlete of the 20th century. In 1986, she received the James E. Sullivan Award as the top amateur heptathlete in the United States. She also has a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame.

Along with the sudden death of her sister-in-law in 1998, Joyner-Kersee endured other great tragedies as a young child. When she was 11, she saw a man get killed. A few years later, she called her grandmother to talk, only to find out her grandmother too, had been killed. Also, when she was a freshman at UCLA, she suddenly had to return home when her 37-year-old mother contracted a rare form of meningitis. By the time she arrived, her mother was in a coma and brain dead. Since her father could not bring himself to have life support removed from his wife, it fell to Jackie and Al to authorize removal, which they did.

her greatest challenge, however, was physical. She suffers from exercise-induced asthma, and on more than one occasion had to be hospitalized following an event.