By Helen Weathers


In the jungle, Fatima Whitbread lost two stones in just three weeks, dropping to eight stones (pictured above with son Ryan)


Former World javelin champion Fatima Whitbread returned home from the I’m A Celebrity jungle on Tuesday with two rather unpleasant little souvenirs.

The first is sitting in a plastic container on the table separating us. It is the rather large cockroach which became wedged up her nostril during a bushtucker trial and had to be flushed out by the camp doctor with a syringe.

‘I’ve nicknamed him LB, short for Little B*****d,’ she grins, shaking the dead critter. Clearly he won’t be bothering her again.


The second memento, if you can call it that, is rather more troubling.

Within hours of leaving the jungle in third place Fatima collapsed in her hotel room in front of her terrified 13-year-old son Ryan who’d flown out to meet her.

She’d lost two stones in just three weeks, dropping to eight stones, the result of contracting a parasite from the pond water used to boil rice for their meals.

‘What frightened me most was catching a glimpse of my body in the bathroom mirror after my first proper bath,’ says Fatima, who is undergoing further tests at the Hospital for Tropical Medicine in London.

‘I felt very weak and ill. Not long after that I collapsed and a doctor had to be called out and diagnosed dehydration and the parasite infection giardia. It’s annoying because it will take some time to get back to normal. I have a lot of pain and discomfort when I eat and feel quite unwell.’

Certainly, when the 50-year-old single mother walks into the room, jet-lagged from the long flight home, she looks surprisingly delicate; fragile, even.

To add to her woes, her appearance in the jungle also seems to have re-ignited the simmering resentment of her arch sporting rival,
Olympic gold medallist Tessa Sanderson, who apparently couldn’t resist taking a swipe at Fatima’s ‘manly’ appearance on the show.

Following Fatima’s eviction, Sanderson reportedly wrote on Twitter: ‘It’s a jungle, so the best man didn’t win, eh, smile.’

‘I suppose old habits die hard,’ sighs Fatima.

‘I was 15 when Tessa, whom I idolised, first told me: “I haven’t worked my a*** off to be second to you.” She’s continued in the same vein ever since, so I’m not surprised.

‘If you’re athletic, of course you are going to look muscled. I am what I am. I’m not Bo Derek and if I were I wouldn’t have been able to throw a javelin. I needed the tools for the job. I’m happy in my own skin.’

Even so, some might consider it rather demeaning for an athlete of Fatima’s status (11 major titles, MBE, former Sports Personality Of The Year) to be reduced to the ritual humiliations of reality TV.

Yet that would be to underestimate the immense troubles that she has faced away from the sporting arena in recent years.

For all her outer toughness, Fatima has to stifle her tears several times as she talks about the legacy of her appalling childhood, and the mounting debts — triggered by the death of her ex-husband in 2007 — which drove her to take part in I’m A Celebrity.

Born in North London in 1961, the result of an ‘indiscretion’ between a Turkish Cypriot mother and Greek Cypriot father, she was abandoned as a baby and spent the first 14 years of her life in a children’s home.

A deeply troubled, rebellious child, her life was saved by sport and the love of her javelin coach, Margaret Whitbread, who adopted her at 14 and whom Fatima regards as her real mother.

Such was her thirst to succeed, Fatima went to extraordinary lengths to be the best.

Competing against 6ft amazons, Fatima (5ft 5in) force-fed herself enormous high-protein meals to produce the muscular body which still draws comment to this day.

‘Sport was my saviour,’ she says. ‘It gave me something to live for. It won me the respect of my peers. It was the one thing I was good at.

‘Growing up in a children’s home, I didn’t get birthday cards, I didn’t get presents, I didn’t get kisses and cuddles. When you cry, there is no one to pull you on to their lap and tell you everything will be all right.

‘You learn to shut off and build a wall around you. Then you don’t expect too much, you don’t get disappointed, and happiness comes from within.’

'People remember me as Fatima the athlete, but I wanted them to see Fatima the woman,' she said of her time on I'm A Celebrity...


Up until she was 11, social services tried a number of times to reunite Fatima with her birth mother, Hunifer Vedad, who’d left the newborn Fatima alone and starving in a flat until her cries alerted neighbours and she was rescued.

Fatima can barely bring herself to talk about these disturbing meetings with Vedad, who coldly treated her like an unpaid slave, forcing her to do the housework.

‘When I was about 11 my biological mother brought two men to the children’s home to check me out, like pimps,’ she recalls.

‘It was horrible. I didn’t want to stay with her, but social services took no notice and went against my wishes.’

During her next visit ‘home’ Fatima says she was raped by a drunken lover of her mother, who herself held a knife to her daughter’s throat and told her to shut up when she screamed.

After the attack, Fatima’s behaviour at school deteriorated to such an extent she was referred to a child psychiatrist who, on learning of the abuse, ensured she never had to see her mother again.

‘My way of coping was to shut myself off emotionally from what had happened,’ she says. ‘I shut it away and moved on. What else could I do?’

In contrast, Fatima idolised her absent father — a former policeman from Limassol who worked as a barber — even though he did little to deserve it. Contact with him was sporadic.

‘Once, when I was four, he took me on the bus to his barber’s shop, holding my hand all the way,’ she says.

‘I idolised him because he was such a big, striking-looking man,’ she says.

‘He was always promising to come to the children’s home and take me away for the weekend. I would spend all day sitting on the wall outside waiting for him to come, but he never came. I would sit there for hours, weekend after weekend. In the end I lost faith.’

Fatima’s last memory of her father is of him hurling his dinner plate against the wall in a temper and storming off as Fatima wept, hiding under the table.

Fatima was abandoned as a baby and spent the first 14 years of her life in a children's home


‘At the time, my father had a girlfriend who couldn’t have children. One day I was upstairs in bed and heard them arguing. She was begging him to marry her, saying I could be their child.

‘I then heard him say he wanted a boy and he didn’t want me. I cried and cried. After that I remember trying to dress as a boy, only to please him.’

Two years ago both Fatima’s biological parents died within months of each other; her father from a brain haemorrhage and her mother from a stroke.

‘I never held anything against my biological mother, so I didn’t feel I needed to forgive her. I just accepted it was what it was,’ says Fatima.

‘If anything, I felt sad when she died because she was still my lifeblood, but everything I know about love I learned from the Whitbread family who adopted me.’

As for her biological father, Fatima makes the startling revelation that they were — after 40 years — reunited on his deathbed.

It was, however, the cruellest of conclusions to this saddest of stories.

After Fatima’s birth, her father had gone on to marry and have several more children. One of them turned up at one of the sports development camps Fatima was running after a shoulder injury forced her retirement in 1989.

‘This young lad, aged about 11, sidled up to me and said “We’ve got something in common”, then he pulled out a photograph and said “we share a father”,’ Fatima says.

‘He was my half-brother and he was obviously proud to be related to me.

'He very much wanted to get to know me, for us to have a relationship, but I didn’t want to revisit that part of my life.

‘So, I gave him a hug and said: “You have your life with your Daddy and I have mine and it’s best they remain separate.” I gave him my telephone number, but he respected my decision and never called me.’

Two years ago, however, the half-brother left a note on Fatima’s doorstep asking her to call him urgently. Their father was seriously ill in hospital and he hoped a visit from Fatima might rouse him from his coma.

‘I went immediately. I don’t know what I was looking for; maybe recognition, some sign that he did love me and was proud of me,’ she recalls.

‘I didn’t want the memory of him hurling his dinner against the wall to be my last, but he was brain dead by the time I arrived. It was too late.

‘I cried to see him in that state, lying there with a machine keeping him alive. But as I left the hospital his sister walked up to me, saw me in tears and said “I don’t know why you should care, you were only the result of a f***” and walked off.

‘So, the last time I saw my father I was left with that thought.’

'Sport was my saviour. It gave me something to live for. It won me the respect of my peers. It was the one thing I was good at,' said Fatima


The experience was crushing for Fatima, especially as it came at a very difficult time in her life, juggling being a single mum with caring for her ill mother Margaret, and trying to keep the financial wolves from the door.

She put herself forward for a role promoting London 2012, but — bizarrely — was told her services were not required. Likewise when she applied for a national javelin coaching job. At one point she considered stacking shelves in a supermarket.

‘It was making me physically ill, trying to scrape around to make ends meet, so when I was offered I’m A Celebrity I said Yes instantly,’ she says.

‘It was a job — and when you are a single mum with bills to pay, you have to look at it only as that.’

Fatima’s financial woes were triggered by the collapse six years ago of her marriage to sports agent and promoter Andy Norman, a former policeman who, by the Eighties, had become the most powerful figures in British athletics.

They divorced in 2006 after Fatima discovered he was having an affair. They remained friends for the sake of their son and Fatima admits she never stopped loving him.

Then, when Norman, who she’d known since she was 16, died suddenly from a heart attack in 2007, Fatima’s life was thrown into turmoil.

‘When Andy died I was in mental anguish. How do you explain that to a nine-year-old boy who loved his Daddy?’ says Fatima.

‘Despite everything, I still loved Andy. How could I stop loving the father of my son?’

During their years together Fatima had co-signed a letter agreeing for her husband, who’d lost his job in British athletics, to raise a £2,000 bank loan against the equity of their £1.5 million Essex home to attend athletics events abroad.

She thought it was a one-off, but unknown to her, the letter was used several more times to raise further loans, totalling more than £40,000 for which Fatima was liable after his death.

‘I was horrified, but I didn’t feel angry towards Andy because I know he wouldn’t have deliberately done anything to hurt me or our son. He didn’t know he was going to die. He was an honourable man.’

Forced to sell her home for £1.25 million, she paid off the debts and downsized to a bungalow, investing the rest with her past athletics earnings which today brings her an income of £11,000 a year.

Her son’s private school fees are £12,000 a year alone and she also supports her adoptive mother Margaret Whitbread, 72, who was forced into early retirement in 2002 after she was left disabled by a burglar who pushed her down a flight of stairs at the college where she worked.

‘It’s a struggle juggling and every time another bill landed on the mat, it was seriously affecting my well-being, so I have no regrets about taking part in I’m A Celebrity,’ says Fatima.

Given her own difficult start in life, she will do anything within her grasp to ensure her son has the security and education that she was denied.

But quite apart from the fee, the unexpected bonus, she says, is rediscovering who she is and — as the last woman standing in the jungle — how popular she remains with the public.

‘For the first time in years I had time to think about who I really am because I’ve been so busy juggling balls and I found I like myself. People remember me as Fatima the athlete, but I wanted them to see Fatima the woman,’ she says.

‘I am a survivor. My experiences have made me what I am today.

'We can chain ourselves to the ground or we can all fly free like a bird. I didn’t want to live my life in chains.’


source:dailymail