by Mayukh Ghosh

She was named Jacqueline after the wife of U.S. President John Kennedy because, in the words of her grandmother, " Some day this girl will be the First Lady of something".

Childhood was tragic. Growing up in a poor neighborhood in Illinois, at the age of eleven she saw a man murdered across the street from her house. Three years later her grandmother was shot and killed by her drug-addicted boyfriend.

She was in college when she came to know that her mother had contracted a highly contagious form of meningitis and had slipped into coma. She had to take the difficult decision of taking her mother off life-support.

Within a decade, Jacqueline ( born March 3, 1962) started to win everything she took part in. She married her coach, Bob Kersee, who told her that she won't be able use his name until she broke a world record. She took only a couple of months to become Jackie Joyner-Kersee.

Rest , as they say, is history.