We speak to a man who has used his wealth to assist a number of Britain’s finest athletes on the path to success
Around four years ago, Barrie Wells thought his days of funding athletes were over. Since 2008 the millionaire benefactor had given a total of roughly £2 million to Katarina Johnson-Thompson, Jess Ennis-Hill and fellow Brits to boost their medal chances at major championships.
As the pandemic unfolded, he focused his efforts on his Box4Kids scheme instead, yet things changed when he received a phone call from Jenny Meadows, one of the athletes he used to help.
“I had pretty much stopped funding individual athletes unless someone incredible came out the woodwork,” Wells remembers. “But Jenny and her husband Trevor told me about a young athlete called Keely and the kind of times she was running.
“I looked at what she was doing and I thought ‘this is someone exceptional’. I found she had a decent cross-country background but also this base speed. I didn’t want to go back to funding athletes, but Keely seemed rather special.”
Keely Hodgkinson and Barrie Wells
Wells made his fortune creating and selling businesses and, as a huge athletics fanatic and former athlete himself, he has been on a mission for the past 16 years helping British athletes with funding.
In March 2020, just days before the first Covid lockdown in the UK, I visited Wells in his offices in Lancaster and in a subsequent feature dubbed him “the most generous man in British athletics”. Now, with the Paris Olympics in full swing, I tracked him down at the Stade de France a couple of days after Hodgkinson struck Olympic gold to ask him about how he came to support the 800m star.
“We checked out her social media and background,” he recalls, “and she was this well-behaved girl who was focused on being an athlete. I really got on with her and I liked her mum and dad as well. So I came on board and asked what I could do.”
Wells doesn’t just throw money at athletes. “I need to know their plan,” he says.
With Ennis-Hill it was help with physiotherapy and access to additional javelin coaching from Mick Hill. For Hodgkinson, she needed to get away for warm-weather training during the pandemic in addition to helping get Painter to the holding camp ahead of the Tokyo Games.
Keely Hodgkinson celebrates with Trevor Painter (Getty)
Soon, the investment paid off as she won Olympic silver in Tokyo. “Since then I don’t really need to help her,” says Wells, “as she earns enough money herself.”
Hodgkinson has not been a complete one-off, either. Wells has helped Molly Caudery in recent months, although the British pole vault record-holder had a nightmare in Paris as she failed to make the final.
Like Hodgkinson, Wells made an exception for Caudery, but on this occasion because he has a soft spot for her event. His grandfather was Ernest Latimer Stones, a world record-holder for the pole vault in the 1880s, so when he bumped into Caudery’s coach Scott Simpson one day in a hotel lift, he agreed to help with some of her global travel in her quest to become the world’s No.1 pole vaulter.
Amusingly, though, Wells feels Caudery is often too embarrassed to ask him to pay for flight upgrades so that she can stretch her legs on long-haul trips because of the sheer cost!
A rising star, Caudery will hope for more success at the World Championships in Tokyo next year. Wells did however still have plenty to cheer in Paris, as his self-confessed favourite athlete, Johnson-Thompson, won her first Olympic medal with heptathlon silver.
Molly Caudery (Getty)
His favouritism is because he first met KJT back in 2008 when she was just 15 and he began providing her with funding to help with her training. Since then, the two have become close friends and Johnson-Thompson has been Patron of the Barrie Wells Trust since 2012.
In recognition for all the help he has given her, the heptathlon star has paid the millionaire back in spades by becoming a regular host at his Box4Kids events.
Such is the size of the scheme, one recent weekend saw 24 Box4Kids events held around the nation and it has given brilliant experiences to around 20,000 seriously or terminally ill children at events ranging from the London Diamond League to football matches at Anfield – the home of Wells’ and KJT’s beloved Liverpool FC.
Wells enjoys seeing his athletes recognising the support that he originally gave them. He appreciated, for example, that Hodgkinson stopping during her lap of honour at the Stade de France to give him a hug in the stands, while her mum, Rachel, hosts Box4Kids events at Old Trafford, a no-go area for a die-hard Liverpool fan of course.
“Some athletes see it as a ‘transactional relationship’,” says Wells, “which is a bit sad to see. When their funding comes to an end, I don’t hear from them again. But with others, they remain in touch.
“A great example is Dai Greene. He was fourth in the hurdles and relay at London 2012 and his funding came to an end but he still devotes about four weekends a year to hosting Box4Kids, which is really nice.”
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