Athletics hero Colin Jackson was plagued by rumours about his private life throughout his athletics career – but it was the least of the Olympic champion’s worries

Colin Jackson has no regrets over waiting to come out as he shares hidden battle(Image: Sean Collymore)

For years, Colin Jackson pushed back against suggestions he was gay – shutting down speculation about his sexuality in his autobiography – before casually coming out to the world at the age of 50 in 2017.

The Strictly Come Dancing star was far from living in the closet before talking publicly about his sexuality, with the former world record holder loved and supported privately by his family and friends in the wake of a kiss and tell in 2007.

Olympic champion Colin has no regrets about the timing of sharing his personal life publicly as he was actually fighting other heartbreaking battles behind closed doors.

The intrusive speculation about his romantic relationships was actually the least of the former sprint and hurdling athlete’s worries as he juggled mental health struggles alongside achieving sporting greatness.

But does Colin think his story may have been different had he been competing in this day and age? Colin ended his athletics career at the 2003 World Indoor Championships – 10 years before the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013 was introduced. Attitudes have changed since people speculated about Colin’s sexuality at the height of his career.

So does he wonder if he might have come out publicly sooner had he been competing in 2025?

Colin Jackson has teamed up with SPAR to launch a campaign to get men speaking about their feelings (Image: Sean Collymore)

“I think it would be quite similar for me personally, because I think it’s always everybody’s individual stories and how they want to perceive themselves and tell themselves,” Colin muses.

During his career representing Great Britain, he won an Olympic silver medal, became world champion twice, world indoor champion once, was undefeated at the European Championships for 12 years and was twice Commonwealth champion.

But away from the track, Colin was battling multiple unseen battles. Struggling with anxiety, bulimia, anorexia and body dysmorphia with the whole world’s eyes on him, the Olympic hero didn’t want to draw even more attention to himself by discussing his personal life publicly.

“I don’t think [coming out] would have changed that much for me because I was solely focused on my athletics, on my sport, and nothing really deviated from that,” he recalls. “I mean, I had enough issues going on as it was with the anxieties and then to add another layer on it, would have absolutely blown my brain, to be honest.”

Colin’s anxieties intensified when he retired from athletics at the age of 36. Having “only done two things in my life, go to school and run”, he recalls worrying about how he was going to fill the years ahead.

“The anxiety just poured on me, thinking ‘well, what am I going to do with the rest of my life’, because I have nothing to fill the void that was so filled previously, and I had huge anxieties about that,” Colin shares when looking back.

Colin got help after speaking out and he wants other men to do the same (Image: Sean Collymore)

When his anxieties started to present physical symptoms: “It was like I was having a heart attack, you know, the deep breathing, the sweating” – Colin went to see his GP, who diagnosed the champion with anxiety.

“So you’re not having a heart attack, you’re literally just suffering from anxiety, so be aware of it,” Colin recalls his doctor telling him. “ And then he started to teach me some coping mechanisms in how to calm my nerves, calm my environment, and start to recognise what were the triggers for the anxieties for me personally, and it could be literally anything and come from nowhere.”

Although Colin has a better grip on his triggers these days, he is still conscious about the danger of bottling things up – particularly for men.

In 2023, over 6,000 lives were lost to suicide in the UK – 75% of them men. New statistics claim that 44% of men have had fewer than two meaningful personal conversations with a male friend in the past year.

With this in mind, Colin has partnered with SPAR to launch a national campaign encouraging men to open up and speak about their feelings – even via something as simple as a summer BBQ.

“It never stops and you know and what I say to people is that we all have brains and they function in all different ways and the chemicals that are in our brains are all different in that sense,” Colin explains when discussing his own journey with mental health struggles.

“So different environments will trigger certain emotions and feelings, and they could be all sorts. I was coming from a sport which was all about body image, and I was struggling with how I looked.

“I suffered from bulimia, anorexia, and body dysmorphia. I had all these things which are all still mental health issues that I was trying to cope with as well as race and compete against the best in the world.

“It was a huge amount of pressure on some young shoulders and now when I look back at that younger me, I just go, how did you cope? And in the end, I coped by speaking.

“That was it in the end, you know, I had to find the people that were going to listen to me and were willing to listen to me. So you can understand now how this campaign is so, so close to me, because we can reach so many people with this particular story with SPAR.”