Katharine Merry

Katharine Merry (born 21 September 1974 in Dunchurch, near Rugby) is a former English female sprinter.

Career

A member of the Birchfield Harriers athletics club, Merry won a bronze medal in the 400 metre sprint at the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, Australia.

Merry had a career that spanned 20 years. Aged 12 she topped the UK Under 13 Rankings in 7 different events. She was the fastest girl in the world aged 14 years old, and started her international GB career aged just 13, and stayed on the junior team for a record 6 years, which included 5 Junior Championships winning a total of 5 medals. She transferred into a successful senior athlete with her Olympic medal in Sydney, in the 'Race of the Games' winning bronze behind Australian favourite Cathy Freeman in Stadium Australia in front of 112,000 people. The following year she became World number 1. She was coached by fellow Olympic medallist Linford Christie in his Cardiff based training squad which included fellow Olympic medallist Darren Campbell. She is also with Christie's sports agency Nuff Respect. Merry still holds various UK age record bests, including U/13 High Jump and several sprints, as well as the Senior UK Indoor 200m record of 22.83 secs. Also World age records, including aged 14, 7.35 secs for 60m indoors.

She is 2nd on the UK All Time 400m lists indoors and out. Outdoors her 49.59 secs run places her behind Kathy Cooke.

After suffering from a bone spur growth on her right heel bone, and after 2 operations, in July 2005 Merry announced her official retirement from athletics.^[1] She had been suffering from the injury since 2001 and was struggling to get it healed fully. It had prevented her from getting back into proper training meaning she could not get back to her year 2000 form. Despite this, she still ended the 2001 season as the world's fastest female 400m runner.

Retirement

Merry now mentors British Junior athletes,^[2] and works in the media on Radio and TV including presenting for the BBC and also is a regular part of BBC 5 Live, including working in Beijing at the Olympics for the BBC.^[3] As well as working and presenting for the BBC she also presents for Sky TV, Channel 4 and Channel Five. Currently she is the solo infield presenter for all the British Grand Prix Athletics meetings and also does this role in Europe and in the USA, as well as hosting other sports. Merry also does corporate speaking engagements, whilst running a free sports mentoring website elitementor.com with Christie and Campbell. She also appeared in All New Celebrity Total Wipeout on 25th September where she struck up a rivalry with the man who in her words "ate all the pies", John Regis. She 'ran' the qualifier in 2:16 beating Regis by 50 seconds and then beating him again on the next two of the next three events (winning Crash Mountain 2nd to 6th, The Blob losing 1st to 3rd and winning The Beams 2nd to 3rd ) but losing finally in the Wipeout Zone finishing 3rd behind Regis and eventual winner DJ JK. She won overall 3 events to 2.^[4]

She has appeared several times on Radio 5 live's Fighting Talk and on the edition broadcasted on 6th Nov 2010, she revealed that she was pregnant. She gave birth to a boy, Lucas in February 2011

Achievements

Personal bests

References

External links

• Merry at Nuff Respect, Linford Christie's agency