{"id":558283,"date":"2026-04-30T06:56:10","date_gmt":"2026-04-30T06:56:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/558283\/"},"modified":"2026-04-30T06:56:10","modified_gmt":"2026-04-30T06:56:10","slug":"olympics-i-felt-relief-when-i-lost-the-medal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/558283\/","title":{"rendered":"Olympics: &#8216;I felt relief when I lost the medal&#8217;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">By the age of 21, he represented England in the 1966 Commonwealth Games.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">In 1967, he won his first title as British National Sprint Champion.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Barnett, now based in Shoreham, Kent, said as his career progressed the pressure of track racing began to overwhelm him.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;I was flying,&#8221; he said. &#8220;But in all honesty, my mind had gone a bit.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">In 1968 he travelled to Mexico for the Olympic Games, where he fell into a deep depression.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;Nowadays they have psychiatrists, but I had always been on my own,&#8221; Barnett said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">When it came to the deciding race, he lost out on the chance for a medal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By the age of 21, he represented England in the 1966 Commonwealth Games. In 1967, he won his&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":558284,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[4985,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-558283","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cycling","tag-cycling","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=558283"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558283\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/558284"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=558283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=558283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=558283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}