Klüft, Carolina

Carolina Klüft, in full Carolina Evelyn Klüft, (born February 2, 1983, Sandhult, Sweden), Swedish track-and-field athlete who won a gold medal in the heptathlon at the Athens 2004 Olympic Games.

Her father, Johnny Klüft, was a Swedish first-division football (soccer) player, and her mother, Ingalill Ahlm Klüft, was a long jumper. Carolina, the second of four daughters, known to her fans as “Carro,” followed in her family’s athletic footsteps. In 1995, at age 12, she placed second in her first championship multi-event, a youth track-and-field triathlon, and she did not lose another multi-event until May 1999.

She won world junior heptathlon titles in 2000 and 2002 and in the second of those victories broke a world junior record that had stood since the year she was born. When Klüft won a gold medal at the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens, her 517-point margin of victory over Lithuanian silver medalist Austra Skujyte was greater than Skujyte’s margin over the 25th-place competitor. In 2005 Klüft, then aged 22, became the youngest athlete ever to have won the “grand slam” of the five track-and-field championship titles available to Europeans: the Olympics plus both the indoor and the outdoor International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF) world championships and European championships. She was troubled by a hamstring injury in 2006 yet still managed to repeat as gold medalist at the European outdoor championships, held in Gothenburg, Sweden. By the end of 2007 Klüft had contested a career-total 45 multi-events (indoors and outdoors) and had lost only 6, her last loss coming in 2002 in an indoor European Cup pentathlon. In the 293 component events of these 45 competitions, she had failed to finish just one: in 2000 at the Swedish junior championships, when she abandoned the heptathlon-concluding 800-metre run but nonetheless finished with enough points to secure an age-18-and-under national title.

Klüft also was an accomplished long jumper, with a personal best of 6.97 metres (22 feet 10¹/₂ inches) set in 2004, the same year she won the bronze medal in that event at the world indoor championships.

In 2007 Klüft won a record third consecutive IAAF world championships title in the heptathlon, with a score of 7,032 points, the second highest in history. Her tally, a 31-point improvement on her previous personal best, was the highest in 18 years and vaulted the then 24-year-old Swede past Larisa Nikitina of the former Soviet Union on the all-time list. Only world-record holder Jackie Joyner-Kersee of the United States had scored higher. Although Joyner-Kersee’s heptathlon world record, set in 1988, loomed just 259 points from her grasp at the end of 2007, Klüft indicated that she would turn her attention full-time to the long jump in future seasons. She did, however, compete in both the long jump and the triple jump in the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, although she did not win any medals. A hamstring injury kept Klüft out of the 2009 world championships, and she finished fifth in the heptathlon at the 2011 world championships. Another hamstring injury prevented her from participating in the London 2012 Olympic Games, and she retired in September 2012.