Kelly Holmes: Sport empowers troubled kids

Dame Kelly Holmes has told how sport can make young people from disadvantaged backgrounds feel “empowered”.

The double Olympic gold medal winner said watching competitive sport could also encourage girls to have a healthier attitude to their bodies.

She set up her charity, the Dame Kelly Holmes Legacy Trust, to partner sportspeople as mentors to disadvantaged children and teenagers.

The retired runner said: “We try to help disadvantaged young kids back into education, employment or some form of training, and using sportspeople allows us to bring a fitness and health element to it.

“The people we see who come from poor backgrounds don’t do a lot of sport, and often experience deteriorating health, which causes them to lose their confidence and self-esteem.

“Introducing them to sportspeople who have been there, and who are from different backgrounds and upbringings, really helps the kids.”

Holmes, who was BBC Sports Personality of the Year in 2004, said she had seen how “bringing sport to young people empowers them”.

Speaking at the Women of the Future Awards 2013, she added: “The Olympics showed girls that you can be whatever type of woman you’d like to be and still have sport as an outlet.

“They also showed how sport should be used as a health and fitness tool, and that’s inspired young females to think differently about their appearance rather than how skinny or fat they are.” Holmes won gold in the 800m and 1500m at the 2004 Olympics in Athens and still holds several British records.

At the ceremony she presented the business award to Kerry-Anne Lawlor, a director at BT Openreach.

Other women recognised included Julie Chappell of the Foreign Office, who became Britain’s youngest ever ambassador at the age of 31, and Eliza Rebeiro, founder of anti-gangs campaign group Lives not Knives.