Anyika Onuora: ‘I couldn’t tell anyone – a lot of abuse in sport is swept under the rug’

“If I said I wasn’t nervous I’d be lying,” Anyika Onuora suggests with a little smile in the front room of her mother’s house in Liverpool. We have known each other since I first interviewed Onuora in April 2017 and in the intervening years she has confidentially told me everything she is now about to share with the world. Onuora is an amusing and intelligent woman, full to the brim with life and laughter, but her story as a black female athlete is framed by haunting racism and sexual assault.

Her important and powerful new book, My Hidden Race, was published on Thursday. This is Onuora’s first interview about subjects we have discussed privately for so long and, suddenly, everything seems very real.

She is 37 and retired as a 400m sprinter in 2019, having won medals at the Olympic Games, the world championships, Commonwealth Games and European championships. Onuora is proud of her achievements and acknowledges the help she received. But she is intent on proving “you can’t brush things under a carpet for ever”. She is ready to talk about her experiences and the people she feels failed to support her and her black female teammates.

“I wanted to tell my story in my own words,” she says, “but I had to relive so much trauma. My mother is reading the book and it’s hard. I think part of her feels she failed as a parent. That’s sad and definitely not true.

“I’ve always been one of those resilient people who gets on and moves from the next race to the next competition. But below the surface I went through a lot – and I didn’t talk about that with her or anyone for a long time. For my mum to find out now about the sexual assault and attempted rape …”

Onuora shakes her head. The photographs on the wall capture a large Nigerian