What former Olympic champion has done since retiring
Linford Christie was one of the UK’s most famous athletes with a string of sprinting records and medals to his name.
Now the sportsman will reflect on his career highs and lows in a new documentary, entitled Linford, which will be broadcast on BBC One on Thursday 25 July at 8.30pm.
The 90-minute show has exclusive interviews with Linford, his family and friends, his former athletic peers such as Sally Gunnell and Jonathan Edwards, his young proteges such as Daren Campbell and Katherine Merry and some of the journalists who followed his career in the 80s and 90s.
Speaking abut his decision to do the programme, he said: “I have been asked to do a documentary on my life for over 15 years.
“I was finally convinced to do it by my friends and it’s something that my kids can look back on and pass onto their kids.
“I am not the type of person who naturally looks back and reflects, so that was difficult for me to do but it has made me appreciate how far I have come and how lucky I am to have some great people around me.”
What is Linford Christie doing now?
Father-of-eight Christie effectively retired from competing in international athletics in 1997.
Since then, he has worked as a presenter on BBC shows Record Breakers and Garden Invaders and done some work for BBC Sport.
He had a brief spell as an actor appearing in episodes of comedy show Absolutely Fabulous, school drama Grange Hill and crime drama Hustle.
The sprinter also tried his hand at reality television with appearances on winter sports reality show The Jump, ITV’s I’m A Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here! and The Masked Singer: I’m a Celebrity Special special last year.
For 12 years, he ran ran a youth engagement programme called Street Athletics (2005 – 2017), funded by the Home Office and Department Of Justice in Scotland.
More recently, the 64-year-old has been working as an athletics coach at Brunel University in Uxbridge.
He told the Daily Telegraph: “Compared to everyday people I do feel fit.
“But athletically, no.
“In comparison to the guys I coach at Brunel University six days a week, I’m not really that fit anymore.
“On a scale of one to 10, I’d say I’m a seven.”
What were Linford Christie’s career highlights?
During the course of his athletics career, Jamaican-born Christie won 24 medals becoming a world and Olympics champion.
He is the only British man to have won gold medals in the 100m at all four major competitions open to British athletes: the Olympic Games, the World Championships, the European Championships and the Commonwealth Games.
He 1992, he won an Olympic gold medal in the 100m in Barcelona, the same year he came first in the World Cup in Cuba.
The following year, he came first in the 100m at the World Championships in Stuttgart, Germany and won gold in the 100m and 200m at the European Cup in Birmingham.
And in 1994, he won gold in the 100m at European Championships in Helsinki, Finland and the Commonwealth games in Victoria, Canada.
He was the first European athlete to break the 10-second barrier in the 100m and held the British record in the event for almost 30 years.
In 1993, he was named BBC Sports Personality of the year and was appointed an MBE in 1990 and and OBE in 1998.
Why did Linford Christie get banned?
His career came crashing to an ignominious end in 1999 when he tested positive for the banned substance nandrolone, during a routine test, at an indoor meet in Dortmund, Germany.
UK Athletics found him not guilty at a hearing but International Amateur of Athletic Federation (IAAF) overruled this and he was suspended from athletics for two years. He was also banned for life from the British Olympic Association.
He had faced an earlier disciplinary hearing at the 1988 Seoul Olympics because of an adverse drug test for a banned stimulant but escaped sanction after the committee voted by a margin of 11 to 10 and gave Christie “the benefit of the doubt”.
Christie argued that he had taken it inadvertently when drinking some ginseng tea.
Speaking about the incident and a phone call to his dad during the BBC documentary, he said: “They say drugs and therefore everybody starts thinking he’s injecting something into his body.
“It hurt, you know, because I knew I didn’t do anything, I didn’t intentionally take anything.”
The athlete has always denied taking any drugs and has been a long-term campaigner against the use of performance enhancing substances in sport.