Richard Whitehead's biography
International Day of Disability
- Paralympic sprint and marathon gold medallist
- Marathon world record holder and MBE recipient
- Charity founder and disability sport advocate
Richard Whitehead MBE is a double Paralympic gold medallist, four-time world champion, and the fastest amputee marathon runner in the world. His career has been defined by pushing the boundaries of what elite sport can look like.
A double below-knee congenital amputee who competes with prosthetic legs, Richard represented ParalympicsGB as a sledge hockey player at the 2006 Winter Games before transitioning to track athletics. He has won two Paralympic gold medals and a silver across the 100m and 200m and also holds the Chicago Marathon world record for his category. Richard has broken his own marathon world record multiple times, most recently at the 2026 TCS London Marathon, and completed his 100th career marathon in 2025. He was appointed MBE in the 2013 New Year Honours list for his services to sport.
In 2021 Richard launched The Richard Whitehead Foundation, a UK charity enabling disabled people's ambitions through sport and physical activity. He has run 40 marathons in 40 consecutive days to raise funds for Sarcoma UK and Scope, and serves as a patron for various charitable foundations. His commitment to community and inclusion extends through his work as a disability inclusion consultant with partners including Bupa and Nissan, and through advisory roles with organisations navigating accessibility and culture change.
As a keynote speaker and inclusion consultant, Richard works with organisations across corporate, healthcare, and sport sectors to build cultures of resilience, accessibility, and high performance. Audiences leave his sessions with a sharper understanding of how to reframe setbacks as fuel rather than barriers, and with a practical lens for long-term legacy thinking.
Richard's story does not simply inspire, it challenges audiences to act. Book him to give your event a moment people will still be talking about long after it ends.
Photo © David Baird
Richard's showreel and videos
Topics, sessions and talks
High Performance And Preparation
Richard Whitehead MBE has broken his own marathon world record twice in 2026 alone, running his 100th career marathon in 2025 across 20 events worldwide. This session draws directly from that training and competition experience to examine what genuine high performance preparation looks like — the discipline, the adaptation, the decision-making under pressure. Richard unpacks the habits and mindsets that carry athletes through adversity, and frames them in terms that resonate for teams, organisations, and leaders facing their own performance challenges.
Resilience And Overcoming Barriers
Richard Whitehead MBE first ran a marathon in 2004 having never run a mile, fitted with his first running blades just 13 days before race day. That story of rapid adaptation under pressure sits at the heart of this session, which examines how setbacks, obstacles, and external barriers can become the conditions for growth. Drawing on a career spanning two Paralympic cycles, four world championship titles, and over 100 marathons, Richard explores what it takes to continue when the path changes without warning.
Diversity, Inclusion, and Accessibility
As a disability inclusion consultant working with organisations including Bupa and Nissan, and as the founder of The Richard Whitehead Foundation, Richard Whitehead MBE brings operational credibility to this often-theoretical subject. This session moves beyond policy and into practice, addressing how organisations can make accessibility visible, how representation shifts culture, and why the business case for inclusion is inseparable from lived human experience. Audiences leave with a clearer framework for what meaningful inclusion looks like in their specific context.
Leadership And Inspiration
Captaining the ParalympicsGB team at the 2019 Dubai Para-Athletic World Championships, founding a UK charity, and consulting to corporate advisory panels — Richard Whitehead MBE's leadership experience spans sport, philanthropy, and business. This session examines leadership as a practice of inclusion, accountability, and visible action. Richard explores what it means to lead in environments where the rules are sometimes written against you, and how the principles that shaped his athletic career translate into the decisions that define organisations.
Teamwork, Goal Setting, And Motivation
Richard Whitehead MBE completed 20 marathons in a single year in 2025, a challenge that required meticulous goal-setting and sustained collective effort from coaches, support teams, and sponsors. This session uses that challenge as a lens through which to examine how teams set meaningful goals, maintain motivation across long timelines, and hold each other accountable to shared outcomes. Richard brings both the strategic and the human dimensions of high-performance teamwork, making the session applicable to organisations at any stage of a major programme or initiative.
Why we recommend booking Richard
Richard commands the credibility of a world-record-breaking athletic career, combined with hands-on inclusion consulting for brands like Bupa and Nissan. With four world titles, multiple world records, and a live consulting practice in inclusion, he brings real substance as well as inspiration to his talks.
Richard's talk was expertly tailored to our event, with clear takeaways that applied across the many different disciplines represented by our delegates. Richard was generous with his time, happy to answer questions, pose for photographs and engage with our wider social activity. We would recommend Richard as a keynote speaker for organisations seeking to deliver an engaging and impactful event.
Richard Biggs
Irwin Mitchell
I was thrilled when the opportunity arose to have Richard Whitehead along to lead a lunchtime business run from our Nottingham office. To say this was a game changer was an understatement. It goes without saying that it was great to have a focus — raising awareness of Richard's Foundation, which strives to promote inclusivity in all types of sports. But going on a lunchtime run with Richard is so much more than a run: warm ups, warm downs, stretching, sprint sessions: the real ticket to improving fitness. And delivered with such great humour. Thoroughly recommended and will definitely change my training regime.
Richard is brilliant to work with. He is not only an incredible athlete and inspiration in his own achievements, but his love of sport and the power of sport for all is contagious. His open and honest approach to championing inclusivity, and his determination to always find ways to enable more people to benefit from the power of sport to unite people, makes for a positive and proactive direction. He is a valuable member of Bupa's Accessibility Advocacy Forum, his contribution helps us to look at the bigger picture, consider societal shifts required, differences across the globe and how we can influence change through a culture of understanding and inclusion across both our business and our approach to healthcare. He has also been an invaluable partner to us in several campaigns to show the world that we all have health, we all have a health story, sharing our stories can help not only us but others too.
