Those with the mildest of interests in athletics will probably think of a distinctive hairstyle when they hear the name Jamie Baulch. Those floppy blond dreadlocks became so associated with the world champion sprinter from Wales that he even called his book The Flying Pineapple.
Yet there is so much more to the enigmatic 50-year-old grandfather. In a wide-ranging interview he told of his battle with his identity, why he’s bitter about how his only outdoor gold medal came about, how living with Colin Jackson changed him, and how his mission to find his biological mother was the strangest and most fulfilling experience of his life.
Jamie, a mixed-race talented schoolboy who discovered very early in his life that he had a “God-given talent” for running thanks to fast-twitch muscle fibres in his legs, grew up in all-white middle class household at a farmhouse in Risca just outside of Newport. He’d been put up for adoption before he was even born by his real mother Teresa Patey.
Teresa, a cook at the time, had split up with Jamie’s biological father and she felt she couldn’t bring him up alone – especially in the 1970s when she thought there would be too much of a stigma around a single mother rearing a mixed-race child. When Jamie was just six months old he was taken in by Alan and Marilyn Baulch who he calls “mum and dad” to this day. An architect and school teacher, Alan and Marilyn already had three children but felt a duty to help Jamie who was considered a “hard-to-place child”.
“Originally we lived in Henllys near Cwmbran. It was a very small village, the kind of place where everyone knew each other, but a great place to be. There were only 30 or so people in my junior school,” Jamie recalls from inside his colourful wooden outhouse beside his home in Marshfield which has enough indoor plants to fill nearby Cardiff Garden Centre. He lives here with his wife Cheryl Hicks and her two children.
“As a child I never thought about my skin colour or whether I felt different but I didn’t know anyone that wasn’t white other than me. When my parents moved to Risca when I was 10 I knew that I was the only non-white person there but if my family got any grief for it I certainly didn’t know about it. I didn’t feel frowned upon in any way at all. Looking back I think people respected my parents for having me.
“It was only when I reached 15 and I’m running at Newport Harriers with loads of Black lads alongside me and I’m thinking: ‘Hang on.’ I was one of the quicker ones in the group and I started really liking them and feeling like I belonged there. Suddenly I’m travelling around the UK on a bus on the racing circuit and we’re blasting reggae out the windows and I’m in my element and feel attached to something that I didn’t know was part of me before.
“I really went for it after that. I got the dreads and really got in touch with my West Indian side. I ate curried goat, wore colourful clothing, and started experimenting. The further I went with it the more attention I’d get and I loved it.
“I remember when I first got my extensions I was in the chair at the barbers watching Neighbours in the afternoon and then by the time the next Neighbours episode came around in the evening I was still in the chair. I was nervous heading back home with this crazy hairstyle but as soon as I walked into the living room mum said: ‘Wow, I really like that.’ I’m not sure how much she actually liked it but it meant so much to me because it felt like her opening the door to this other side of me and my two identities merging.”
He attributes his stellar career on the race track, where he claimed a long list of honours including an Olympic silver in 1996 in the four by 400m relay, a World Championships gold in 1997 in the 400m sprint, and a World Indoor Championships gold in 1999 in the 400m sprint, to Alan and Marilyn. “Just amazing people,” he says. “I was the one who wanted to run but they took me everywhere with Newport Harriers to follow that dream.”
As a youngster with the Harriers he’d race teens double his height at national competitions and he’d rarely, if ever, win. “I was, and still am, really short compared to others my age so I’d win my junior school races but then as soon as I moved up to secondary and was competing at national competitions with kids with moustaches I was finishing well behind them and yet by the time I reached 15 and I’d grown into my body I’d become the quickest sprinter in the country.
“It was one of the best things that ever happened to me, losing all the time, because I grew up not thinking I was the best. I met loads of people along the way who were supremely talented but didn’t reach the heights they should have because they couldn’t handle defeat whereas I’d been losing races constantly from a young age. It all felt like a blessing.”
He still holds the 400m British indoor record at 45.39 seconds that he set at the UK trials for the 1998 Commonwealth Games, which he says “baffles” him considering the developments in sport science, facilities, and equipment in the intervening years. On the odd occasion he visits a track locally he ascertains it might be because athletes don’t tend to go to the lengths those of his era did.
“I do enjoy going and watching now,” he says. “I didn’t for a long while but now I’m far removed from it I’ll go down to the track and I sometimes leave quite disappointed – only because I see people not fulfilling what they’re capable of. There’s no way I should still have that record and when I wonder why it’s still there I keep coming back to how much effort I put in and how I was coached. No-one I ever came across in the sport worked as hard as I did but I also had brilliant coaches in Linford Christie, Colin Jackson, and Innocent Egbunike. They were hard on me, really hard, to the point it wouldn’t be allowed anymore. To me they weren’t doing anything wrong – they just wanted the best for me. But now if you swear at an athlete or perhaps even tell them something they don’t want to hear you could be out the door. I’m left thinking: ‘Do you guys want to be good or not?’”
Innocent would often pray before Jamie raced – and that was on his training days. “He was a genius. He’d do little things to get every last drop from you. One of the hardest sessions I ever did was after Innocent prayed for me to run my best ever race during a training day in Atlanta. Even now it makes me feel sick thinking about how hard I ran that day but how could I not give it my all after he’d prayed for me? My head had gone – he’d got me throwing up every day and I’m just thinking: ‘I can’t let this guy down.’ Sometimes I thought it’d kill me and I’m not joking about that. It was that serious for me.”
Given how hard he had worked I ask how painful it was that gold in the four by 400m relay at the 1997 World Championships was robbed from him after American sprinter Antonio Pettigrew, who went on to help the US team win the race, had taken performance-enhancing drugs. After Pettigrew admitted to doping Jamie was awarded the gold medal by Welsh Athletics at the Senedd in 2010 alongside teammate Iwan Thomas but he got no compensation for lost earnings. Pettigrew took his own life later that year.
“I think of my mum and dad and the effort they put in and the miles they did to see me get to that level and I’d have loved them to have seen me take that gold in that rostrum in front of 80,000 people. I can’t lie – I’m bitter about it all. It was my only senior outdoor gold medal and to have it at the Senedd was tough to take. I hate everything surrounding it. I was gutted to hear Antonio had died and if I could have the clock turned back so none of it had happened I would.
“The odd thing was during the ceremony I basically just got chucked a bronze medal too after I’d been bumped up because of a similar situation with a competitor doping. It was sort of just brushed under the carpet as: ‘Oh you’ve got this too.’ To be honest I don’t even know what year the bronze is from or what competition. That sums it up really. You put so much work in and lose to someone who has cheated and then when the truth comes out you’ve basically still lost anyway because no-one cares anymore. I probably lost a hell of a lot of money from people cheating against me over the years. We’re talking life-changing amounts.”
Given the potential figures he lost out on he’s remarkably philosophical about it all. “Cheating is terrible but I can’t sit here and say: ‘I don’t get why people do it.’ Of course I’d never condone it. But the difference in money between finishing first and finishing second in a sport like running is huge. Most have never seen money like that and in that moment they’re so close to the top of the world and the temptation to cheat overcomes some. I know some who have done very well on the surface out of their careers and they’re cheats. It’s a huge problem in the sport and it’s never gone away. Personally I felt I owed it to myself and everyone who worked so hard for me to do my best, come second, and look everyone in the eye as an honest man after I’d crossed the line knowing I did things properly.”
He first came across Jackson when they were youngsters at youth competitions when they got on well but Jamie described his shock when, during the Commonwealth Games in Canada in 1994, Jackson invited him to live with him in Florida for six months of the year to take part in warm-weather training camps. Jamie lived at Jackson’s pad on and off for the next five years. Often at the house were Christie, Frankie Fredericks, Merlene Ottey, Bruny Surin, and Mark McKoy.
“It changed so much for me being there,” Jamie recalls. “When you’re in that environment success breeds success. It was non-stop every day rinsing everything out of each other. I’d even watch how Colin tied his laces. What’s he eating for breakfast? That sort of thing. If I was going to be there with these champions I didn’t want to be the also-ran – I wanted to feel I belonged.
“Colin was unbelievable. He paid for my flights. It was unheard of to have someone still at the height of their career coaching another runner but he just wanted to help me. Even now I look back and think: ‘How lucky am I to have met this bloke?’ I won the lottery when I met Colin.”
While he no longer runs he still trains most weeks with Jackson, who also lives locally, at a gym in Cardiff and he walks with Cheryl every day. He has two sons of his own – Morgan, who is in musical theatre in London, and Jay, who is a motion designer in Cardiff and gave Jamie his first grandson, Isaiah, who is now two.
He runs two silent auction companies where people donate to various charities by bidding for prizes including experiences with celebrities. “It’s gone really well,” he says. “I’m fortunate I’m a bit connected, as is Cheryl, so we can pull in some favours. I sometimes get frustrated in this world because I find it’s very slow – pardon the pun. I’m often twiddling my thumbs waiting on responses to emails. I also find it hard to accept that in some ways this field is discretionary and relies on other people whereas in sprinting it was pretty black and white – you’re good at it or you’re not and I was. I have found it hard in this line of work when sometimes people have struggled to understand my thought process. It takes a bit more patience than sprinting did, for sure, but I enjoy it.”
While he’s no longer directly involved in professional sprinting he heads out to St Lucia in the Caribbean twice a year to coach tourists in the basics of running. “I’m essentially coaching people the technique of how to run and 90% of people don’t have a clue. They’ve got to their mid-30s or 40s and they don’t know it. It’s easy to see why. It’s not taught from a young age. No disrespect to school teachers but they’re not going to teach it properly so where are kids going to learn how to run properly? To some it might not be important but to me kids should be taught the fundamentals of running because I believe if you can run that little bit faster or you can enjoy exercise a little bit more with some knowledge to empower you you’re going to do everything else a little bit better as well.”
He says a lack of support and initiative led to the Jamie Baulch Academy disbanding. Through the academy, which was set up in 2012 at the height of Olympic fever, Jamie would get Olympians into schools to inspire children and teenagers. “It was a brilliant thing and I really loved it,” he remembers. “At the time the Welsh Government really backed us with funding and it was done properly but what we found was that straight after the Olympics was over the funding and interest from outside fell away. 2012 was amazing for British athletics and sport in general and then by 2013 no-one’s interested and something else is the priority. To me it should have remained a priority. Nutrition and exercise in teens is something that needs to be addressed but I felt so small speaking to the powers that be and I was getting nothing back. If there was an opportunity to do something like that again I’d jump at it.”
After years away from the limelight Jamie’s name became as connected to his adoption story as it was sprinting when he embarked on a journey to find Teresa in 2013. By the following year, through an adoption agency based in Swansea, he found she was living in Devon and he organised to meet her. The whole thing was authentically covered for a documentary which was aired on the BBC. It transpired Teresa had watched Jamie on television without knowing she was watching her son.
“Meeting her was one of the craziest experiences of my life. I was 41 with my own kids and there I am with my mother who I’ve never met waiting to see me on the other side of the wall. I remember opening the door and her being crouched over and sat down. What do you say in that situation? Do I shake her hand? That’d be weird. Do I hug her? Well I’ve never met her so probably not. In the end I ended up sort of awkwardly rugby tackling her before I burst into tears.
“I remember Teresa meeting Marilyn for the first time at the Celtic Manor. That was a weird experience too. Marilyn gave Teresa flowers and said: ‘Thanks for giving him to us.’ Teresa replied: ‘Thanks for having him.’ That was special – to see these two brilliant women being so mature and kind about a moment which could easily be prickly and awkward was amazing. When we were leaving I shouted ‘mum’ and they both turned around.
“It was strange but I’m so glad I did it and found her. It adds another element to my life. I don’t want my headstone to read: ‘Jamie Baulch, good runner, good dad.’ I’d like to think there’s a bit more to me than that and I think that documentary and everything we found out added another layer to the story.”
In 2016 Teresa died of lung cancer, living nearly two years longer than doctors expected. “I knew her death was coming but it was still hard,” Jamie adds. “Ultimately I was left with a feeling of being really grateful to have met her when I had the chance. I would often go and see her and take her a box of Ferrero Rocher. When I look in the mirror now I see her every day.
“Perhaps there was something preordained which brought us together in the end. I’m not massively into all that. But, that being said, maybe I am. It’s opened a Pandora’s box in terms of some unanswered questions I’ve got. Now that I’m older I do feel much more inquisitive about why I’m the person I am.”