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. As a baby, Whitbread was abandoned in a flat in London and essentially left to die. After hearing her cries, neighbours called the police. Whitbread recovered in hospital from malnutrition, dehydration and her terrible physical condition, then spent her childhood in children’s homes. “I felt this deep sense of loss within me,” she says. When she was five, she was introduced to her biological mother – having had no idea of her history – and moved to a children’s home in Essex, where she had two half-siblings. “That was the first time I started questioning what was going on in my life and what was to become of me.” Whitbread began training hard. “I started taking more responsibility for myself,” she says. “You have a whole lot of people that help you, but I’ve got to get myself out at 5am, down the gym, three times a day training, seven days a week.” She trained in a wooden shed at the bottom of the garden of a family friend. She smiles when she talks about how different facilities are now: “I wouldn’t have had it any other way. I loved every minute of it.” Her success brought fame – and intrusion. The tabloids found her biological mother. The trauma resurfaced. “It forced me to have to tell my story. That was really the start of the demise in my athletic career, because it brought me to a physical and mental breakdown.” While training for the 1988 Olympics, she was also writing a book about her childhood, to try to get control of her story. “It was awful. I shouldn’t have gone to that Olympics, but I managed to pull on all my reserves and I came away with the silver medal.”

Donna Hartley was the Golden Girl of our time which helped Maria to bring in much needed sponsorship for the Women’s AAA and in doing so provided us all the opportunity to compete in against the best of the rest in the world. We also had some amazing women officials who turned up at every event around the country voluntarily to help stage these marvellous events. 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 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. Discover today's celebrity birthdays and explore famous people who share your birthday. View popular celebrities life details, birth signs and real ages. In the run-up, when she should have been training hard, she lost “all sense of time. My procrastination was terrible. When I was throwing, it was all over the place – 30 metres, 40 metres, 70 metres.”

Sport saved her, she says. “It gave me a sense of freedom, forgetting all the problems that were going on in the home and the life we were living. It gave me a sense of achievement, that here was something I was good at. I got validation from my PE teachers and my school friends and started to realise life was a bit more positive. I realised that this could be my way out.” Fatima Whitbread was born on the 3rd day of March 1961 and was christened Fatima Vedad at birth. Her biological mother was of Turkish Cypriot descent while her father was a Greek Cypriot. She was not loved or wanted by her mother and was abandoned till neighbors called in a rescue team. Fatima spent the next four months after her rescue to recuperate from dehydration and malnutrition in the hospital. Fatima lived the next fourteen years of her life in halfway homes and welfare centers. Fatima proceeded to Dilkes County Primary School in her early years and attended Culverhouse Secondary School after that. Carving A Niche

In 1997, she married Andy Norman, the controversial athletics promoter, with whom she had a son, Ryan, a year later. (Norman had been implicated by the coroner in the 1994 suicide of Cliff Temple, a Sunday Times journalist who had been investigating Norman’s conduct as promotions officer of the British Athletics Federation.) After her traumatic childhood, she was determined that her son’s would be different. “I felt I would be a good mum,” she says. “I believed in myself. It was important for me to be able to prove that I could be a good mum and break the mould of what I’d been through.”

Did You Know?

It was known as our athletics family – we all felt seen, heard and embraced. Magical memories for all those that competed in those years of women’s athletics! She and Norman had experienced years of infertility, followed by a miscarriage, before their son was born via a third round of IVF. Norman left her for another athlete when Ryan was small, although he and Whitbread managed to remain close. Then, in 2007, he died suddenly, leaving Whitbread to raise Ryan alone. On top of that, it emerged that Norman had taken out loans, partly in Whitbread’s name, which put her tens of thousands of pounds in debt. She had to sell the family home. The fees from reality TV kept her afloat and helped her rebuild her profile. Her net worth has been growing significantly in 2022-2023. So, how much is Fatima Whitbread worth at the age of 62 years old? Fatima Whitbread’s income source is mostly from being a successful . She is from Great Britain. We have estimated Fatima took bronze at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and in 1986 at the European Championships took gold and became a record breaker with a throw of 77.44m which added over 2 meters to the previous world record held by Petra Felke of the GDR, making her the first British thrower to break a world record. We owe a lot to Maria Hartman who fought hard for her girls and supported each and every one of us through a tough era in the 70’s and 80’s.