Daily Mail columnist Liz Jones became the most unpopular person in athletics this week when she launched a vicious attack on sport and used the example of the “sinewy” Fatima Whitbread to make her point.

Jones, a former editor of Marie Claire, greeted the former world javelin champion’s eviction from the I’m a Celebrity … Get me Out of Here! contest by writing: “Whitbread is not being seen as a great advertisement for young women who might be thinking about taking up a sport. Her overdeveloped arms are deemed too masculine, the legs too sinewy, the breasts merely slabs in a sea of testosterone.”

Jones went on to slate sport in general, by saying: “The Government has just scrapped its plan to improve the nation’s fitness levels as a legacy of the 2012 Olympics because the number taking part in sport at a grass-roots level has slipped, and the target of getting two million more people active by 2013 is now hopelessly out of reach. But so what? You can’t tell me top athletes eat healthily or even look that attractive.”

Not surprisingly, her comments drew outrage among Britain’s athletics fraternity. Goldie Sayers, Britain’s current No.1 javelin thrower, was among the first to hit back, saying: “I’ve never felt so incensed about an article! I would happily invite Liz Jones for a training session.”

Kelly Sotherton, the 2004 Olympic heptathlon bronze medallist, said: “Liz Jones produced a very uneducated article in Daily Mail today with no real fact or knowledge about female sport. She needs to come training!”

World 400m hurdles champion Dai Greene, one of the BBC Sports Personality contenders, added: “I couldn’t believe what I was reading, what a load of nonsense! Is she serious!?”

Andrew Steele, one of Britain’s top 400m runners and son of TV doctor Chris Steele, said: “It beggars belief. It’s truly one of the most incorrect and ill informed opinions I’ve ever witnessed. Daily Mail probably pay her many times more than athletes receive and she uses it merely to offend and depress an entire demographic.”

Eilidh Child, Scotland’s No.1 400m hurdler, added to the outrage: “As a PE teacher, athlete (and person!) I find this article completely ridiculous and rather insulting!”

Emily Pidgeon, one of Britain’s best young female distance runners, described the column as “insulting” and Jones as “poisonous”.

People from other sports reacted too. Gaile Emms, the Olympic badminton silver medallist, fumed that it was: “Possibly the worst, most pathetic and ridiculous article I have ever read.”

Like Sotherton and Sayers, Emms also challenged Jones to spend a day with them training or talking to children about sport in schools. She added that it was: “Very desperate. done for controversy and we are talking about it. Am sure 99.9% of people reading it will take it as s%*t.”

Elsewhere on Twitter, Ned Boulting, the Tour de France writer and broadcaster, wrote: “More crap stuff doing the twitter rounds from a dreadful hack called Liz Jones from the Daily Mail.”

Jones does however have some form in this area. Last month she attacked runners in general. “I hate people who jog,” she blasted, before insulting Britain’s greatest athlete of modern times, Paula Radcliffe. “Do you really want to look like Paula Radcliffe in later life?” she asked.

Even worse, she attracted a huge backlash after writing an article about the murder of Joanna Yeates in the Mail on Sunday. Media writer Roy Greenslade described the backlash on that occasion in the Guardian: “This absurd stuff attracted mockery across the Twittersphere, with hundreds of comments lampooning her self-referential approach to the tragedy.”

At the top of her column, the Daily Mail describes her as “Funny, outrageous and downright rude.” The usually polite athletics world has some rather different words to describe her at the moment, though.

» Jason Henderson is the editor of Athletics Weekly