Fatima ; The Autobiography of Fatima Whitbread

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The 61-year-old won a silver medal representing Britain in the javelin throw at the Olympics in Seoul 1988, having won bronze in 1984 in Los Angeles.

She was one of the celebrities with experience of fostering or adoption who took part in “Find a Family” on ITV in 1989. Whitbread came in for her last competitive event in the year 1989, and she was still young at the time having only celebrated her 27th birthday then. During their respective careers, Whitbread gained one world and one European title; Sanderson won an Olympic and three Commonwealth golds. It gave me a sense of freedom, forgetting all the problems that were going on in the home and the life we were living.She is surely one good show away from “beloved” status, which might prove to be the I’m a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! Whitbread and Sanderson were always uneasy rivals and the enmity that developed during their overlapping careers became as famous as their achievements, and seems to survive in their retirement (Whitbread in 1992, Sanderson in 1997). Eloquent, articulate and concise in her role as a sports speaker and Olympic speaker, Fatima Whitbread is well known for her intrinsic motivation; overcoming severe adversity and not using it as an excuse for failure.

At the 1986 Commonwealth Games in July, Whitbread broke the Games record twice during her first three throws, and led with a distance of 68. As she kept to her nurturing sessions, she graduated to the senior level in no time and began to make her mark. The pair became close, and Fatima was adopted by the Whitbread family aged 14, by which time she was specialising in the javelin; a decade later she was throwing at the Los Angeles Olympics with Margaret as her coach.Both as mum and daughter and athlete and coach, we worked it out somehow – and we conquered the world. Whitbread begins to cry, adding: “She taught me a lot about looking after the other kids and how you give and you receive. The only person who showed Whitbread any love was a woman who worked in the home, known as Auntie Rae. On 21 July 2012, Whitbread appeared with Sharron Davies in the BBC One quiz show Pointless Celebrities which aired on 26 May 2012. She confessed that her monthly periods escaped for the next eight years as she kept to the tough regimen.