British sprinter is a great role model – both on and off the track – as she races in the World Champs 200m
“Mummy, are you going to run fast?” Three-year-old Zuri Dos Santos looks up at Bianca Williams inquisitively. The track is his playground and he is in awe of the talent around him.
“I absolutely love bringing Zuri to the track with me,” says Williams, who describes his joy at learning to use blocks and how he cheers for her in training. “Children are great imitators, so give them something to imitate.”
A European and Commonwealth 4x100m gold medallist, the 29-year-old made her Great Britain and Northern Ireland debut at the European Under-20 Championships in 2011. She won 200m bronze at the 2014 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow and reached the semi-finals of the 200m at the 2017 World Championships in London.
Williams has long been an achiever but now, more than ever, she’s a role model too.
Zuri was born at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020. It was an uncertain period of time for everyone, but it brought a unique set of challenges for Williams and her partner Ricardo Dos Santos, a Portuguese sprinter, as they balanced parenthood with elite sport and relative isolation.
“When I envisage having a baby, I envisage people coming round with lasagne and bringing round all these foods that I’m going to put in the freezer,” she laughs. “That never happened. It was tough.
“People didn’t really know how Covid was spreading at the time so they didn’t want to see the baby in case they had it and passed it on. It was hard in that sense, but then it was nice because we could just be a family of three.”
As Dos Santos continued to train for a soon-to-be-postponed Olympic Games, Williams and baby Zuri accompanied him to the track. She started walking around the oval with the pram but, after six weeks, she started to move more and to do low impact running drills. “All of a sudden I was doing 200s,” she says.
She began to work with Linford Christie – already coach to Dos Santos – and benefited from the family set-up as her gradual reintroduction to athlete life began. “It just made sense for us both to be in the same place with the baby,” says the Thames Valley athlete.
Bianca Williams (Mark Shearman)
“Looking back, I could have taken more time [to get back into it], but there’s no right or wrong way. I guess it was just harder because I couldn’t get the support that I really and truly…
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