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Who is Fatima Whitbread as the Olympic medallist takes on Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins challenges?-Meghna Amin-Entertainment – Metro
The former athlete is one of the 14 celebs taking part in SAS this year.
Fatima is enduring the brutal challenges of SAS (Picture: Channel 4 / Pete Dadds)
Olympic medallist Fatima Whitbread is one of 14 celebrities enduring the brutal temperatures of the Jordan dessert as she partakes in this year’s Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins.
Love Island winner Amber Gill, former EastEnders actress Maisie Smith, and Strictly Come Dancing’s AJ Pritchard are among the names competing this year.
AJ’s brother Curtis has also signed up for the new series, as well as footballer Ashley Cain and former Olympic sprinter Dwayne Chambers.
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 broke the world record with a throw of 77.44m in the 1986 European Athletics Championships in Stuttgart, becoming the first British athlete to set a world record in a throwing event.
The next year, Fatima went on to win the 1987 World Championships, and took part in the 1990 UK Athletics Championships before she formally retired in 1992.
The former athlete has won two medals in javelin (Picture: Ian Gavan/Getty Images)
Towie stars Pete Wicks and Ferne McCann are also taking part this year with 12 other celebs (Picture: Channel 4 / Pete Dadds)
Since then, she’s appeared on several TV shows, including I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! in 2011.
Her stint in the 11th series in the Australian jungle left her in joint third place, and also left a pretty memorable moment in viewers’ minds when a cockroach ended up getting stuck up the former professional athlete’s nose, with Fatima requiring help to flush the creepy crawly out from her nostril.
However, she ended up keeping the cockroach, which she dubbed ‘LB’ to stand for ‘little bastard’.
Fatima gained her MBE in 1987, for services to athletics, and has appeared on shows including A Question of Sport and Celebrity Wrestling.
In an emotional mirror room scene on tonight’s SAS: Who Dares Wins, Fatima opens up about her emotional childhood, telling DS (Directing Staff) Mark ‘Billy’ Billingham and Jason ‘Foxy’ Fox that she was ‘abandoned as a baby and left to die.’
After impressing the DS during the notorious gassing challenge, in which, unlike many of the other celebs, she kept her cool, Fatima opens in the mirror room, telling Billy and Foxy: ‘Yeah it’s hard, I didn’t expect it not to be, but you dig deep and see what you’ve got.’
Fatima opened up in a mirror room scene about her emotional childhood (Picture: Channel 4 / Pete Dadds)
Foxy replies: ‘I’ve known you since a young age, and you’re like an inspiration to me.’
She then shares: ‘I was abandoned as a baby, and some would say left to die, in a flat in London, and a neighbour heard that baby crying for a couple of days and didn’t see anyone coming or going, so she reported it.’
The javelin Olympic medallist continues: ‘The police obviously came along, banged the door down, rescued the baby and it got taken into hospital, where I stayed for six months.
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‘I spent the first 14 years of my life in children’s homes, I didn’t have any visits, I didn’t have any birthday cards or anything to indicate that there was anybody out there.
‘I was fortunate to find the love of the Whitbread family at 14,’ explaining this came about through sport being her ‘saviour’.
Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins returns to Channel 4 tonight, Sunday, 4 September at 9pm.
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