Leon Baptiste’s Athletes Have Been Without Their Coach Since June

Leon Baptiste, a British sprints coach whom UK Athletics pays as a consultant at its Loughborough base, has been uncontactable since traveling to Morocco in mid-June, leaving a number of international athletes without a coach through the middle of the track season.

Baptiste, 41, is understood to have gone away for the weekend with close friends, and since then neither his athletes nor anyone at UK Athletics has received a reply from him, by phone or otherwise. His absence was reported on Friday by the Guardian, and by the Telegraph the same day. UK Athletics said confidentiality prevented it from discussing him. Britain’s Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office would not confirm anything about the case to the Telegraph, saying only that its support is available to any British citizen overseas. The Guardian said it had approached the British Embassy in Rabat, which had not responded.

A former British teammate told the Guardian: “He was a very calm and sensible chap, in my experience. No one knows what has happened. It is very worrying.”

The coverage so far has framed the absence around Charlie Dobson, but the governing body’s own funding records show it reaches further than that, with Baptiste being listed as the coach alongside two athletes in the British Athletics Paralympic World Class Programme, Zac Shaw and Ali Smith. Dobson said in a January 2025 interview with CITIUS Mag that he had moved to Baptiste from Benke Blomqvist at the end of the 2023 season.

Dobson has not raced since June, as he withdrew from the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow, a decision the Guardian attributed to injury and which Dobson told the Colchester Gazette was made to concentrate on Birmingham. He arrived at the European Championships as his first race back and went out in the 400m semifinals on Tuesday, fourth in 45.18, 0.08 seconds behind the last man into the final. Matthew Hudson-Smith won the title the following evening in 44.17, which is 0.03 seconds slower than the 44.14 Dobson himself ran at the London Diamond League in July last year.

“I am just not race fit at the moment, unfortunately,” Dobson told the Colchester Gazette afterward. He said he had spent five weeks managing “a couple of small little niggles” that had kept him out of the sessions and races he needed. Asked about the period on the track in Birmingham, he called it “an interesting eight weeks.”

UK Athletics staff have been covering the group since June, and Martyn Rooney, who won the European 400m title in 2014 and again in 2016 and whom the Guardian describes as a relays coach there, has been working with Dobson. Baptiste is paid as a consultant rather than employed as a staff coach, and UK Athletics, citing confidentiality, has not set out any continuity arrangement for his group.

The Foreign Office has been explicit elsewhere about the limits of what that support means. It cannot “investigate crimes or carry out physical searches for missing people,” the department says in its published guidance on consular assistance. Its separate guidance for families of people missing abroad states that searches are the responsibility of the local authorities in the country concerned, and that the department cannot fund a search or offer a reward for information. What it does provide is consular: contact with the family, liaison with foreign police, and a referral to Safe Harbour, a British charity that supports the families of people missing overseas.

Baptiste came to coaching from a sprinting career that peaked at the Commonwealth Games in Delhi in 2010, where he won the 200m and ran on England’s winning 4x100m team. He had already won two European under-20 titles in 2003, at 18. World Athletics lists his personal bests at 20.43 for 200m and 10.26 for 100m. He retired in 2014, at 28, having missed the London Olympics two years earlier after knee surgery.

Dobson did not run the 4x400m heats on Friday morning, when Britain qualified second in its heat in 3:01.24. The final was scheduled for Sunday evening. UK Athletics has not said what will happen to Baptiste’s group after the championships.