Iwan Thomas MBE(Image: Newcastle Chronicle)

Welsh sprinting star who was sick on the track amid injury hell sets sights on new record

02 Nov 2024, 12:11 by Rob Cole · Wales Online

At the age of 24, Iwan Thomas had literally conquered the world.

He had secured major medals at the Olympics, Commonwealth Games, European and World Championships in athletics as a 400 metre and 4x400 relay runner.

He was the fastest one-lap runner Britain had ever seen and among the world’s elite.

There was only one way to go – faster!

The four-year cycle of major events should have provided him with plenty of opportunities to heap gold on top of gold and silver on top of silver. Instead, his world came tumbling down, as he now freely admits “my body broke”. It was brutal.

And that’s why the 50-year-old has documented his fast past in an excellent autobiography aptly entitled Brutal. Some sports books just give you the highlights of a career. They let you know how brilliant the author was back in the day. What Thomas has done is show how much damage the sport he loved, that gave him so much in such a short space of time in his life, then did to him.

He was able for more than 26 years to describe himself as the fastest Briton at the classic 400m distance, having reduced the great Roger Black’s previous best time of 44.37 sec to 44.36 sec on July 113, 1997, in Birmingham. Every hundredth of a second counts! But that was as good as it got for the Welshman.

After being the best of British in his event for 9,537 days, it was this year’s Paris Olympic silver medalist Matt Hudson-Smith who stole his crown. He has since taken the mark down to a world-class 43.44 sec, with more to come if he can avoid the same fate as Thomas and stay fit.

“When Matt broke my record I genuinely felt relieved, it was about time. I felt Tim Benjamin could have done it if he hadn’t had to retire through injuries, then Martin Rooney. Then it went for years when nobody was getting near it,” recalled Thomas ahead of last week’s Welsh Sports Hall of Fame “Roll of Honour” dinner in Cardiff.

“So, it was nice to see someone coming through and running well. I can’t believe Matt didn’t win the gold medal in Paris. Even he must have thought the gold was his until those last five metres. He was in a purple patch this year, when every time you step onto the track you feel you’re going to run fast and win

“I literally felt unbeatable in 1998. I’d won the Europeans and the World Cup, then I’d flown in from South Africa to race the next day at the Commonwealth Games in Kuala Lumpur. I was knackered and my body was broken, but there is something magical about the Commonwealth Games.

“I shouldn’t really have won the gold in Kuala Lumpur but I couldn’t help but run fast that year. I just wish it had been an Olympic year. From feeling unbeatable in 1998, everything came crashing down in 1999 with injuries.

“I’d see a glimmer of hope and I’d chase the dream again. I’d have two months without injury and I’d think, ‘Oh my God, I’m back!’ Then I’d get injured again, I’d only be able to train twice a week and then the arrogance would come out: ‘Even only training twice a week I think I can still beat everyone’. The truth was that I couldn’t – I was flogging a dead horse by the end!”

First it was a stress fracture to his ankle in 1999 that required telescopic surgery. Then it was his Achilles in 2003 and further injury ruled him out of the 2004 Olympic Games. He was picked to run for Wales at the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne, but once again an injury ruled him out.

He limped on to 2009, never retiring and hoping against hope that he might rediscover the elixir that turned him into a superstar in 1998, but it never arrived. They say it is the hope that finally kills you. In Thomas’ case it killed his love of the sport and his self-esteem.

With a Welsh-speaking mother from Llandderfel, in Gwynedd, and a father born to Welsh parents in Middlesex, he grew up with his elder brother in Farnborough. He was a hyper-active child who never understood why people wanted to walk when they could run. He spent his early high-school years at Hinchingbrooke School in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, before moving to a boarding school, Stamford in Lincolnshire, after his GCSEs.

He played a bit of rugby, excelled at cross country and was the fastest kid in school. But in his teenage years his greatest sporting success came as a BMX bike rider. He was good enough to be ranked fourth in Europe at one stage and won hundreds of races.

“Sport was always my thing. It wasn’t that I hated losing, but I just loved winning,” he says.

To help him win more often than not, he joined top coach Mike Smith in Southampton. His father dropped him off, paid for the first six months rent and let him get on with it.

His athletics career really began in 1992 when he represented the British 4x400 relay team at the World Junior Championships. He led off and was joined by Guy Bullock, Allyn Condon and Carl Southam in finishing fifth.

The following summer he started a three-year sports management degree course at West London University where he juggled his studies with his training. In 1994 he went to the Commonwealth Games in Canada and reached the semi-finals. A year later he was part of the British relay team that won the gold at the 1995 European Cup and in the summer of 1996, at the age of 22, he reached the final of the Olympic 400 metres in Atlanta.

He went faster and faster through the rounds to join Roger Black in the final. Black won the silver medal, but both he and Thomas had to run in the wake of the great Michael Johnson as he powered to the second of his three successive golden victories in the event.

If that was a taste of the big time, then he joined the big league before the end of those Olympic Games. Running with Baulch, Richardson and Black he won a silver medal in the 4x400 relay, storming off on the opening leg before handing over to Baulch

The year after those Atlanta Olympics, Thomas claimed his first UK Championship title in Birmingham, leaving Black in second place. They then joined forces to win the European Cup relay title, he came sixth at the World Championships in Seville, and won silver in the relay. Then came that golden summer of 1998.

“When I broke the British record in Birmingham that year I thought it was going to be the first of many times I’d improve it. I’d done that in a domestic championship rather than in a major event, where you’d have the Americans pulling you to even faster times,” says Thomas.

“I was only 24 and I never ran that fast again. Injury after injury caused me to lose my identity for a long time. Sport gave me so much when things were going well, but on the flip side in got harder and harder when it wasn’t.”

And that’s where Brutal comes in. As well as being a reminder to his three boys – Teddy, 5, Dougie, 2, and Bowie, 9 months – that their “old man” was a bit of a legend on the track in his younger days, it offers an insight to current and aspiring athletes to read the signs, listen to their bodies and to seek help when required.

“The reason I wanted to be so brutally honest in the book was to just let people know the other side of things. Any sporting career can be over just like that,” said Thomas.

“I’d been asked to write a book over the years but I didn’t think the timing or reason was right. I didn’t want to be just another sportsperson just churning out a book for the sake of it: ‘Look at me I’m great, look what I achieved’. I think I’ve flipped it on its head a little bit by being very honest about my sport.

“Yes, athletics has given me a wonderful way of life and I owe it everything, but for many years it broke me mentally and physically. I’ve tried to be very honest about that and to just show the other side of sport with all the injuries. It’s not all great.

“The timing felt right and I think becoming a father was the real motivation. I knew they wanted me to do an audio book as well and I thought that would be a wonderful way to leave something behind for my boys when I’m not here. They can listen to my voice and say, ‘Do you know what, Dad was alright wasn’t he’.

“Now I can see I’ve got a lot to look back on with pride from my athletics career, but I couldn’t do that for a long time. I really resented the sport and hated myself because my body let me down. For many years I felt I had lost my identity and without sport I didn’t know who I really was.

“The good thing about a team sport is that you have all your teammates around you to chat about what’s going on with you and to discuss your future, but that doesn’t happen in athletics. Things were going so well for me that I just thought it would last forever.

“There were athletes around me who were good to me. Steve Backley and Roger Black were always quite wise and alluded to the fact I needed to think about my future. I just wish that when I spent three or four years trying to come back from injuries, and it became apparent I wasn’t going to get back to where I had been, that someone had told me that.

“Everyone just pussy-footed around the subject. I wish someone had just shook me and told me ‘Your body is knackered, you aren’t going to get back – it’s time to quit.’

“That never happened and I just kept trying and trying to get back. I wish I’d walked away from athletics a lot sooner than I did. If I knew then what I know now, that I pushed my body too much, I don’t think I would have trained so hard.

“That was the only thing I knew how to do, along with my coach knew. It was all about training until I was sick, because otherwise Roger Black, Mark Richardson, Duane Ladejo or Jamie Baulch could be training harder than me. Every day I pushed myself to the limit.

“Now, when I look back, I probably should have been smarter in some sessions and that may have given me greater longevity in my career. But try telling that to a 22-year-old who is fit and travelling the world doing what he loves. To be the best Welsh athlete, never mind the best in Britain, Europe, the Commonwealth or the world, meant I had to run sub-45 seconds.

“Perhaps, if Roger and co hadn’t been around I might have been able to hold back on my training a little bit. Who knows? I was very aware they would all be training very, very hard and so that made me push myself too much.

“I don’t think my coach, Mike Smith, really understood injuries because he hadn’t been a top athlete himself. He was old school and thought it was best to work through injuries. I loved the pain of training and I probably didn’t listen to my body enough.

“So much work, 11 months of training, goes into that one lap performance – and I loved that. Even now I sometimes miss the pain of training. I used to push myself so hard that I’d be sick during some sessions.

“Last year at the Olympic trials in Manchester there was a Scottish 400-metre runner who was puking his guts out after the semi-final. I went up to him and said, ‘You’ll miss this when it’s gone mate’.

“‘What are you talking about?’ he said. Then after a few moments he added, ‘I think I know what you’re talking about’. I told him there will be a time in your life when you are 50 and trying to out-lift the young kids in the gym and you won’t be able to push your body to these limits.

“To be so super fit that you can run so fast that you are throwing up, yet in 10 minutes you’ll be fully recovered, is amazing. ‘Enjoy your youth,’ I told him.”

Thomas’ last 400 metre race is recorded on the ‘Power of 10’ as being 48.01 sec in the Jo Smith Cup. He finished fourth. That was in August 2009 and five months earlier he had run a marathon. He was still clinging on by his fingernails to his athletics dream.

Yet all the time he was training, or trying to stage some form of comeback, any form of comeback, it merely messed with his head. He wasn’t the same Iwan Thomas of old.

“It took a long, long time for me to look back and respect myself and say, actually you did do alright. It was 10 years before I went back to the BBC Sports Personality of the Year awards show because I couldn’t face that world,” he recalled.

“I didn’t see myself as belonging in that company for a long, long time. I felt the sport I love spat me out because of the injuries. I was on my own and it was pretty tough.

“But I remember the day I did go back and David Beckham walked passed me and said, ‘Alright, Iwan?’ I just thought, ‘Bloody hell, Becks knows who I am!’ That made me think, I may have only had three really good years but I obviously made an impact. I still feel fortunate that even though I haven’t been an athlete for 25 years a few people still remember me.

“Athletics was more mainstream in my day than it is now. I can name so many athletes of my generation that most people in the streets would have heard of – the likes of Denise Lewis, Colin Jackson, Sally Gunnell, Linford Christie, Steve Backley, Jonathan Edwards and Roger Black – whereas nowadays, with all due respect, Dina Asher-Smith, Keely Hodgkinson and Matt Hudson-Smith are among only a handful of British athletes that the British public have heard of.”

Maybe it all came too easily to him. As he recalls, when he went to his first Commonwealth Games with Wales in 1994 as a student and ran 45.9 seconds on no training. He was 19 at the time and felt surely that should be his benchmark.

“I think becoming a dad has changed my perspective on my athletics career. When I drop my boy off at school he now gets the fact that people know who I am. He’ll ask, ‘Why was that dad talking to you and how did that mum know your name is Iwan?’” he adds.

“I’ve shown him videos of me running but it’s only in the last couple of years I’ve been able to do that with any real sense of pride.

“As an athlete you have to be pretty selfish. It’s all me, me, me. You have to do whatever it takes to run fast. If that meant going to South Africa for three months and annoying my girlfriend, I wouldn’t care. Now, it’s all about my boys. I’m very aware that being here in Cardiff for this event means I’m missing the school pick up and reading a bedtime story.

“Everything now revolves around my children. I’ve got my identity back because I’m a father to Teddy, Dougie and Bowie.”

In reinventing himself after leaving the sport of track and field Thomas was able to turn to his charm, character and charisma to forge a living on TV and presenting. While he never became a millionaire from his life as an athlete, he admits to have ‘done alright’.

“I’m just so grateful I’ve been able to make a living out of something I love doing. I did alright out of the sport and I never really had to worry about not having any money in the bank. There was Lottery Funding for a while and in 1996 I signed a four-year deal with Asics.

“I never made the sort of money that footballers make, but I was doing OK. It was never ‘Oh my God, I’ve got no money in the bank’, it was more ‘OMG, my dream, everything I am, has gone’.

“I used to thrive off making people happy. Walking through Heathrow Airport the security teams might say, ‘Nice one Iwan, I see you beat the Americans last night’, or walking down the street people would come up and say how much they liked watching me run. That’s why I did it. I knew, as vain as it might sound, that by me running well it brought some joy into people’s lives.

“I feel that joy when I watch Wimbledon, the World Cup or the Six Nations. We all feel joy when we watch sport and I was aware that I was able to bring joy to people. When that went I felt I had let people down.”

He hardly qualifies for being a “let down” in a career that provided so many medals and highlights for Welsh sports fans to enjoy. These days you see him, fully rehabilitated, on TV at major championships. He’s also been a competitor on Strictly Come Dancing and Hunted, helped to present MotoGP Tonight and The One Show among other programmes.

“I didn’t go near an athletics meeting for years. It was only by chance when Katherine Merry was having a baby and she asked me to fill in as the in-field interviewer during the indoor season, that I got back involved,” says Thomas. “I did it as a favour and I haven’t missed since. I’ve done the last four World Championships and that has got me back close to the athletes again. I love that now. Before, I didn’t want to be near them.

“I’d never had any formal training to be a presenter on TV but I’ve always liked being myself. I’m proud that in 2014 on The One Show I interviewed live the then-prime minister David Cameron. My dad messaged me after that to let me know how proud he was of me.

“I’ve somehow made another career for myself in TV, but I feel everything in my life has been leading up to me being a dad. All the things I’ve learned through sport – the determination I had to show, the grit, the hard work and sacrifice – followed by the downside of coping with the injuries I truly think has made me a better person. And I hope those skills I’ve learned will make me a better father.”

Thomas believes the sport is back in good shape again after a few tough years with the likes of Hodgkinson and Hudson-Smith now the pin-up athletes he once was. As far as Olympic 800 metres gold medalist Hodgkinson is concerned he feels she “has got the whole world at her feet”.

“Matt and Charlie Dobson are doing so well at 400 and the strength in depth with both the men and women in middle distance is amazing,” he adds.

He still keeps fit, working out in the gym most days, and there will undoubtedly be a few parents races for him to win at school sports days in the upcoming years. He has run 100-mile, marathon, half marathon and 10K races and is a regular in Parkrun fields on a Saturday morning.

“I still train a lot in the gym and I wouldn’t mind getting back into running a bit more. One of the members of the pop group McFly put up a post on social media recently showing three of the band trying to break Keely Hodgkinson’s 800 metre time in Paris,” he added.

“They did 273 metres each and they ran 2 minutes, 07 seconds. I messaged them and said they needed me to put my spikes back on. They got back to me and I ran with them in my trainers and we beat her time.

“We did 1 minute, 55 seconds. I felt great... until the next morning when I woke up and my Achilles were throbbing. I actually Googled the world record for a 50-year-old at 400 metres – it’s 50.6 sec and is held by an American.

“The World Veterans title was won in 55 seconds last year so I might train a bit and have a go at that – if my body can hold up.”

However brutal his career was, and despite the fall out, it seems Iwan Thomas is very much back in love with the sport he graced for those few glorious, golden years.

Brutal by Iwan Thomas, published by Bloomsbury, is out now.