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.”

a b c Adie, Kate (2005). "2. What is your mother's name?". Nobody's Child (Digitaled.). London: Hodder & Stoughton. ISBN 978-1848943605. Archived from the original on 3 February 2023 . Retrieved 24 October 2022– via Google Books.Born in London to Cypriot parents, Fatima Whitbread endured a disturbed childhood after being abandoned by her mother as a baby and spent her first 14 years in a variety of care homes.

Whitbread with Ferne McCann on Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins in 2022. Photograph: Pete Dadds/Channel 4/PA a b c d e Henderson, Jason (2 March 2021). "Fatima Whitbread at 60". Athletics Weekly. Archived from the original on 9 May 2022 . Retrieved 7 May 2022. Whitbread, Fatima; Blue, Adrianne (1988). Fatima: The Autobiography of Fatima Whitbread. London: Pelham. ISBN 978-0720718560. Apart from that, Whitbread has been a guest on television programs including “A Question of Sport” on which she first starred in 1984, “The Little and Large Show” (1987 and 1988), and “The Wright Stuff” (2012).UK Championships". Athletics Weekly. Archived from the original on 2 October 2018 . Retrieved 12 June 2022. She has also gained one world and one European title, while Sanderson won an Olympic and three Commonwealth gold as well as she was placed higher in 27 of the 45 times that they faced each other in competition in all, Sanderson. 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.