Former Olympic champion Jessica Ennis-Hill has revealed that the fear of picking up an injury was behind the decision to call time on her athletics career.
The 30-year-old made the retirement call last week, two months on from narrowly missing out on another gold at the Rio Games.
Ennis-Hill, who gave birth to her first child in 2014, insists that she has achieved all her goals in the sport and therefore felt the time was right to bow out on a high.
"My body can't cope with the volume of training that it used to," she told BBC Sport. "It was that fear of 'do I push on that one more year and potentially get injured and come away disappointed?'
"Doing the heptathlon, you've got to be 100% motivated; you have to want to do the training or you're not going to get anywhere with it. The past couple of years, I've struggled with injuries and Achilles problems. I'd have sessions that would go really well but then I'd be injured for a few days later.
"Do I say 'I'm in a really nice position here, I've achieved what I wanted to achieve and more' and do I walk away feeling really happy and satisfied? That's what I wanted to do."
Ennis-Hill missed out on heptathlon gold in Rio by 35 points to Belgium's Nafissatou Thiam.
Daniel Lewis
