Grab your popcorn, dust off your dancing shoes and find your most glittery outfit because Strictly Come Dancing season is here.
This year’s competition is particularly special as the show celebrates its 20th anniversary. This season also ushers in a new era for the competition as it fosters a revamped workplace culture following the wave of allegations facing the show in recent months, which have forced the Strictly team to include more welfare measures to support contestants – like employing chaperones to manage relations in rehearsal rooms.
Of course, a new season also means a whole new set of 15 celebrities are about to Rumba, Cha Cha and Waltz across our screens every Saturday night. Among them is multi-sport athlete and TV personality Montell Douglas, who won over BBC viewers as Fire on the 2024 reboot of Gladiators.
Before her time fighting off hopeful Gladiators contestants on our screens, the 38-year-old sprinter represented Great Britain at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, where she reached the second round in the women’s 100 metres.
She previously held a British woman’s record for fastest 100m sprint and won a Commonwealth Gold in the 4x100m relay race in 2010.
In 2016, Douglas switched her sport and took up the bobsleigh. She excelled quickly in the new field, and finished in the top 10 during her Bobsleigh World Cup debut in January 2017. By 2018, she was GB’s reserve athlete for the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang.
She took a starring role at the 2022 Olympic games in Beijing, where she represented GB alongside Mica McNeill in their two-woman bobsleigh team and finished in sixth place.
After pivoting from sprinting to bobsleigh, Douglas became the first female UK athlete to compete at both the Summer and Winter Olympic Games.
Douglas was raised in Lewisham, south London, before she went on to study sports science at university. At the same time, she laid the foundations of her successful sports career and made her first major championship appearance at the 2007 European Athletics Indoor Championships.
Her introduction to TV was in 2011 when she appeared on an episode of Who Dares Wins. Then on Gladiators, strategic and fierce gameplay as Fire saw her become a fan-favourite character batting off the other contestants by wrestling them with a giant Q-tip or rugby tackling them to the ground.
Speaking about her foray into dancing, Douglas said: “Strictly ARE YOU READY, Fire is here to light up the ballroom.”
“Wow I am so honoured to have been asked to do the show. It is such an amazing thing to be a part of and I can’t wait to get started. Hopefully a few of my Gladiator moves will come in handy with the Tango or Paso Doble!” she said.
