Nafi Thiam was born in Namur, Belgium. 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. On 3 February 2013, Thiam broke the junior indoor world record in the pentathlon at a meeting in Ghent with a total of 4558 points, breaking her personal best in 4 of the 5 events. 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 Thiam won the gold medal in the heptathlon at the European Junior Athletics Championships, achieving a new Belgian record of 6298 points.
Senior career
2014 she won the bronze medal at the European Championships in Heptalon. 2015, she won the silver medal at the European Indoor Championships in Pentathlon and at the European U23 Championships in High Jump. On 13 August 2016, Thiam won the gold medal in heptathlon at the Olympic Games in Rio with 6810 points, achieving personal best marks in five of the seven disciplines and defeating reigning Olympic and World Champion Jessica Ennis-Hill of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. 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 28 May 2017, Thiam won the heptathlon at the Hypo-Meeting in Götzis, Austria with a total of 7013 points, again achieving personal best scores in five of the seven disciplines, making her the fourth woman to score 7000 points or higher in competition. As of July 2017, Thiam is third on the all-time list behind Jackie Joyner-Kersee of USA and Carolina Klüft. Her 59.32m Javelin throw in the Hypo-Meeting heptathlon in Götzis broke the Belgian record for the women's individual event. On 6 August 2017, Thiam went into the Athletics World Championships in London as hot favorite, winning the heptathlon world title and becoming the first Belgian to win a World Athletics Championships gold medal. On 10 August 2018 she won the gold medal at the 2018 European Championships, becoming only the third woman to win Olympic Games, World and European Championships in heptathlon, after Carolina Klüft and Jessica Ennis-Hill. On 27 June 2019, Nafi Thiam won the Heptathlon competition at the 2019 Decastar in Talence and then set a Women's Heptathlon High Jump world record of 2.02m immediately afterwards. The Olympic champion has now qualified for the Tokyo Games in 2020. On 2 October 2019, Thiam again went into the World Championships as world lead, 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. Thiam is a member of RFCL Athlétisme, an athletics club operating under the aegis of the Technical and Sports Department of the Royal Football Club de Liège, and is coached by Belgian former decathleteRoger Lespagnard. Besides being a professional athlete, Nafi studies geography at the University of Liège. "I like climatology, I like geomorphology – how the earth is shaped by rivers. A lot of subjects, like a heptathlon. Maybe that's why I love it." she says. Thiam is a UNICEF Goodwill Ambassdor for UNICEF Belgium.
