Fatima Whitbread

50 year old Fatima Whitbread was at the height of her fame in the late eighties, when after breaking the javelin world record in 1986 she went on to win Gold at the World Athletics Championships in 1987, the same year she won the BBC's prestigious Sports Personality Of The Year Award.  Her public profile has been non existent in past years, so she will have to win viewers over in the way that Dougie Poynter, Antony Cotton and Lorraine Chase do not have to, but anyone disciplined enough to win a world gold will have deep reserves on which to draw , as Linford Christie proved in an earlier series of the show.