Australian Olympic hurdler Michelle Jenneke is ready to take the plunge — or, in her case, the jump.
Jenneke, 32, and fellow Olympian Alex Beck announced their engagement on Sunday, December 14, after more than eight years of keeping their relationship a secret.
“8.5 years in the making ❤️💍,” the couple wrote in a joint Instagram post, alongside a carousel of images from the proposal.
The announcement shocked even their biggest fans, as the pair had never posted a photo of themselves together to social media and kept their relationship a secret from the public.
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Beck, 33, competed for Australia at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, finishing sixth in the men’s 400 meters. Janneke, for her part, competed in the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro and the 2024 Paris Games. She is the second-fastest 100m hurdler in Australian history.
Jenneke first rose to fame in 2012 when her pre-race dancing routine went viral. It helped her land a host of modeling opportunities, including an appearance in the 2013 Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.
The added attention came with criticism as her lackluster performance at the 2016 Olympics led to the narrative that she was not devoting her full attention to her craft.
“I think it’s probably easy to look at the exposure that I was getting and think I was doing a lot in that space, but I really wasn’t,” Jenneke told Wide World of Sports in 2023. “The majority of my time I was on the track, I was working hard.”
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“But no, I don’t at all think any of it has ever distracted from what I’ve been doing on the track,” she added. “I don’t think that any of the commercial things I’ve done have ever distracted from what I’ve done on the track.”
The criticism, she said, caused her to question whether she belonged on the Olympic team and caused her to scale back her public appearances. When she returned to the Olympics in Paris, she ran the women’s 100-meter hurdles repechage with a ruptured hamstring after taking a fall the day before.
“Not the Olympics I had dreamed it would be,” she wrote via Instagram at the time. “I felt ready to run the race of my life but unfortunately I fully ruptured one of my hamstring tendons in my heat which caused me to hit a hurdle and take a pretty big fall.”
“I was lucky to escape the fall without hurting myself further and I’m immensely proud that I showed up today against the odds to finish off my olympic campaign,” she added.
Though Jenneke has been competing on the world stage for more than a decade, it does not appear she’s ready to slow down. In August, she just missed out on qualifying for the 2025 World Championships, but told fans via Instagram that she was already looking ahead.
“Sometimes you don’t get that fairytale ending,” she wrote. “Unfortunately I was 0.08 seconds short of qualifying for world champs this year. Pretty tough to get so close and miss out but incredibly proud of what I’ve been able to achieve considering a rocky past 12 months. Good news is I’m happy, healthy and looking forward to trying to tick off some goals next season!”