[JAS84]

The thing is more often than not people say they don't like them, they don't rate particularly better than civilian editions and actually have a higher per episode cost because of the celeb fees (the BBC not so bad, but ITV used to often pay the celebs more than the prize on offer for charity).

Personally I think the trick to celebrity specials is ensuring they're infrequent enough to actually be special - and not just getting any old celeb on. Ideally if they could make the 2024 edition an Olympians special that would be better than just random celebs, but might be filming a bit too soon off the back of the Olympics to make that happen.

Doesn't rule out retired Olympians. A couple of the Gladiators themselves are. I doubt they'd use active sportspeople anyway due to the risk of injury. They wouldn't want to be ruled out of the next football season because they broke their ankle playing Powerball, would they?