She was unbeaten in 22 heptathlon and pentathlon competitions from 2002 to 2007, her entire combined events career as a senior athlete, winning nine consecutive gold medals in major championships.

[1] Klüft first rose to prominence by winning the heptathlon at the 2002 European Championships and setting a new world junior record of 6,542 points.

On 2 September 2012 at the Finland-Sweden Athletics International, Klüft officially ended her career and retired from sports.

[3] Born in Sandhult, Västergötland, Klüft grew up in Växjö, where her father, mother and three sisters still live.

Klüft comes from a family with sporting traditions: her father Johnny played professional football in the Swedish Allsvenskan and her mother was an international long jumper.

She has described being subjected to bullying at school after moving to Växjö and subsequently using her athletic prowess to gain respect.

Her physique was well-suited to multi-events: being tall and lean for the running and jumping events but also powerful enough to perform well in the shot put and javelin.

She visited areas of Sri Lanka hit by the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake to make a film for Swedish TV[8] and also sponsors children in Africa.

With Eunice Barber absent through injury, Klüft won by an Olympic record margin of 517 points, ahead of Austra Skujytė.

The injury affected her performance, particularly in the high jump which was a clearance of only 1.82 m. Klüft fell well behind Eunice Barber but made a comeback with a personal best shot put of 15.02 m and then took the lead after the 200 m. She then stretched her lead with a long jump effort of 6.87 m, and held on to an advantage of only 18 points after the javelin.

Her victory in the 2007 European Indoor Championships in Birmingham was by a margin of only 17 points over home favorite Kelly Sotherton.

[16] Still recovering from her fitness problems of the previous year, she did only one heptathlon before the World Championships, a fifth victory in Götzis.

However, she faced strong competition from Lyudmila Blonska of Ukraine, who had, earlier in the year, set the world best heptathlon score of 2007.

On the second day, Klüft recorded a long jump of 6.85 m, threw 47.98 m in the javelin and ran 2:12.56 in the 800 metres to claim her third World Championship gold.

She posted a personal best points score of 7,032, putting her second on the all-time list, and beating Larisa Turchinskaya's 18-year-old European record.

[18] Klüft missed the 2009 World Championships in Berlin as well as the rest of the season after suffering a hamstring injury she picked up in July in Sweden.

The result was still enough to secure fourth place, but Klüft was 18 cm behind Belarusian Nastassia Mironchyk-Ivanova who claimed the bronze medal.