When you hear the name Kelly Holmes you might imagine her on an Olympic podium receiving a gold medal, or in the ITV studios commentating on the Paris Olympics.
But before the glory of two Olympic golds at Athens in 2004, a damehood and countless TV and radio appearances, Holmes spent the first five years of her life in a care home.
I meet her on a mild April day backstage at the inaugural One Voice Summit in London, organised by fellow athlete and former child in care, the Olympic javelin thrower Fatima Whitbread. The summit’s core goals are to raise awareness for people in the care system.
Holmes is calm and collected for someone who is about to participate in a panel in front of a large audience at the Guildhall. The nerves of live speaking must not even compare to the pressure before the starting gun is fired.
“I remember as a young child not really thinking that [living in care] had an impact on me,” she tells me. “But looking back, I absolutely think it did. During my early teens, I didn’t feel I had an identity; I didn’t think people believed in me; I thought anyone that I got close to would leave me; I thought anyone that I loved would not love me back.”
Holmes’s father left when she was six months old, and her mother was 17 when she put her daughter into foster care, before managing to later get her out of the system. I ask Holmes if this start made her all the more determined to succeed.
“I just had this thing inside me that I want to prove that I can be good at something. If other people doubted that, that’s their doubt,” she says. “Sometimes success is just being happy in your life and getting to that point. For me, it was proving that I can be good and not letting anybody tell me otherwise.
“Whether that was directly linked to having some sort of childhood trauma about being abandoned, or feeling that maybe people don’t care, I don’t know. But there’s definitely a driver in me.”
For Whitbread, the summit—which received a letter of support from Keir Starmer—is about radically improving the care system to better prepare young people for adult life. “It’s really horrendous to think that a lot of some of these young people would rather be in prison, because that’s like a family set-up for them, than be out there, creating the future for themselves,” she tells me.
After Holmes’s mother passed away in 2017, she realised how much those formative years in care had shaped her adult mentality. She started going to therapy to unpack the questions she “never had the guts” to ask her mother when she was alive.
“No matter how long you have been part of the care system, there will always be memories or some trauma that reminds you in adulthood of a time back in that care system that you felt unloved, you felt abandonment, you thought no one really cared about you and you’re never going to be anybody,” she says.
And yet, she reflects, the system is appropriately named.
“I got this letter out of the blue from a lady that used to care for me in the care home, and she sent me multiple photos of me as a child. She told me how each and every child in our little group was, what our personalities were, and she said, ‘I always knew you’d be a champion.’”
“People have always cared for me, but maybe several times I thought they hadn’t. That letter came from somebody in the care system because you wouldn’t be in the system if you didn’t care.”
