Ennis-Hill is Britain’s greatest female track and field athlete

The newly-retired Jessica Ennis-Hill is Britain’s greatest ever female track and field athlete.

That’s the verdict of today’s @Ladbrokes Twitter poll, following the announcement that the 2012 Olympic Heptathlon champion will be hanging up her spikes.

We pitched Ennis-Hill up against fellow athletic legends Sally Gunnell, Denise Lewis and Dame Kelly Holmes, to find out who you thought was Britain’s finest female athlete.

And despite that trio’s resounding success, Ennis-Hill roared home to victory in our poll today with 63 per cent of the vote.

Dame Kelly – double Olympic champion from Athens in 2004 – claimed silver here with a solid 20 per cent of the nominations.

And it was a photo-finish for bronze with 1992 400m hurdles champion Gunnell just pipping 2000 heptathlon gold medallist Lewis by nine per cent to eight.

For many, Ennis-Hill’s announcement today marks the end of an era for one of Britain’s star athletes in recent years.

The Sheffield performer was already World Indoor and European champion, plus World silver medallist, as she headed to London 2012.

And on that Super Saturday, Ennis-Hill became the darling of a nation as she claimed Gold in the same evening Mo Farah and Greg Rutherford ran and jumped into British hearts.

With a silver heptathlon this summer in Rio to add to her haul, Ennis-Hill goes into the record books as one of Britain’s best ever.

Now a wife and mother, nobody can deny she deserves a rest.

But with odds of 3/1 saying she’ll join the Strictly Come Dancing crowd next year, we don’t reckon she’ll be putting her feet up for long!

All Odds and Markets are correct as of the date of publishing