How is new technology affecting athletics? Personally, using my mobile is my main mode of communication. Whether I'm in South Africa training or racing somewhere, it's great to be able to call my coach or to stay in touch via email or SMS messaging. For athletics journalists I guess the beauty is being able to send results and photos from anywhere in the world to be downloaded immediately back in Britain. Obviously, for athletics, things such as timing have to be spot on. With some events world records are set and broken all the time and the difference can be hundredths of a second so reliable technology is vital for things to be exact.

Could you see the net being applied to more areas of athletics? I think the internet is big business and it's expanding into different areas all the time so I don't really see why not. At present, for an athlete who's looking for competition, you can go on to the International Amateur Athletics Federation website which lists all the competitions in Britain and everywhere else. There might be a small athletics meeting out in Italy that no one knows about so it's a great way of getting information out to interested individuals. It is also a great way for people to find out about sportsmen or women. With my own website I know we get a lot of hits from journalists as it is updated weekly.

What made you decide to set up your own website? It was organised before the Olympics and I was hoping that I'd go there and do really well but I got injured so we decided to do it while I was recovering. It's a good way to keep fans up to date and for them to get in touch. It has been a hard two years for me and there have been some really encouraging messages in the guest-book on the site. When I didn't get selected this year, the feedback and support through the site was amazing.

Why don't more sportsmen and women have their own websites? I really don't know. I was fortunate to get a company willing to help set it all up but it needn't be too difficult for others to get a basic website up and running. We release a fair bit of exclusive information via the site and it has very convenient being able to direct people there with questions.

Have you been using the net long? Not really. Setting up the site helped me get more involved with it. The most time I've spent on it was at the Olympics training camp in Australia. We had a lot of spare time and I used that to search a lot of web pages and have a laugh in some of the chatrooms.

Any favourite sites? I was fascinated by sites like Mingers.com and Rotten. I do go to the IAAF site a lot and I was doing a diary for the BBC while I was at the Olympics so I still go to their site.

Are you into gadgets? I'd be completely lost without my mobile phone.

For more information visit: www.iwanthomas.com