1930

Fatima Whitbread MBE (nee Vedad; 3 March 1961) is a British retired javelin thrower. She won in the event at the 1986 European Athletics Championships in Stuttgart, having broken the world record with a throw of 77.44 metres in the qualifying round the previous day. She was the first British athlete to set a world record in a throwing event. Whitbread went on to win at the 1987 World Championships. She is also a two-time Olympic medallist, winning bronze at the 1984 Summer Olympics and silver at the 1988 Summer Olympics.
== Publications ==
She has been a guest on television programmes including A Question of Sport (on which she first appeared in 1984), The Little and Large Show (1987 and 1988) and The Wright Stuff (2012). In 1989, she was one of the celebrities with experience of fostering or adoption who took part in Find a Family on ITV. The series featured the celebrities' own reflections, and also highlighted specific children, inviting viewers to contact the programme if they were interesting in fostering or adopting them. She was a featured "masked celebrity" on Celebrity Wrestling in 2005, and lost her bout against Victoria Silvstedt.
In November 2011, Whitbread took part in the ITV show I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here! Whitbread and fellow campmate Antony Cotton left on 2 December 2011, placing her third. One of the challenges on the show involved her wearing a helmet containing about 7,500 cockroaches. The segment was halted after one of the insects crawled up her nose. It was removed by flushing it out through her mouth with water.
In 2012, she was a regular fitness expert appearing on This Morning. Later that year, Fatima Whitbread: Growing Up in Care featured Whitbread's reflections on her own troubled childhood, and her conversations with others who had experienced serious problems from their parent, and problems with the UK care system. In The Guardian, David Stubbs wrote "More emotional than forensic, this is compulsory viewing nonetheless." In 2020, she trekked the Sultans Trail for BBC Two's Pilgrimage: Road to Istanbul.