The British sprinter Bianca Williams has been banned from driving over a failure to disclose the identity of the driver of a car that police allege had committed traffic offences.
A court imposed the ban despite being told it could jeopardise Williams’s chances of going to the Olympics next year.
Lavender Hill magistrates court heard that Williams, 29, failed three times between April and June 2023 to tell police the identity of a driver alleged to have committed an offence in a Tesla Model 3.
The alleged offences came after Williams and her partner, Ricardo dos Santos, were stopped and searched in Maida Vale in London in July 2020 in an incident that led to the sacking of two officers who were found to have lied about smelling cannabis at the time.
Williams and Dos Santos told a tribunal this year they were racially profiled. Dos Santos said he had been stopped and searched more than 20 times before, the tribunal heard.
In Monday’s case, the court heard Williams had submitted an application to try to keep her licence, claiming being unable to drive would make it “massively inconvenient” for her to get to training. Magistrates rejected her claim she could not use public transport and suspended her from driving for six months.
Williams pleaded guilty to three charges of failing to tell police the identity of a driver, but she told the court she was not driving the Tesla at the time of the alleged offences. Representing herself, Williams said she was working as a tennis coach in the evenings and as a full-time athlete during the day.
The sprinter, who lives in Maida Vale with Dos Santos, said it was “massively inconvenient” to use public transport to get to the central London athletics track where she trained and “really hard” to get to her tennis coaching sessions in north London without a car.
Williams told the court she dropped off her three-year-old child at nursery before training every morning. She said losing her licence would “make my dream of going to the Olympics next year impossible”.
She added: “It’s hard to get from nursery to training. My income would drop because I wouldn’t be able to do any coaching sessions. It would be horrible to lose my licence. I would potentially have no work and no income.”
Williams, who already had 11 points on her licence, said Dos Santos could not always help her get around because he was working as an Amazon delivery driver alongside his training. Rejecting her application, the chair, David Matthews, said: “The bar for an exceptional hardship application is a high one. There are other means of transport.”
Williams was disqualified from driving for six months and ordered to pay a fine of £276, a surcharge of £110 and £85 costs.
