By Simon Briggs
Andrew Flintoff has admitted there were times when he wished he had died in the horrific Top Gear car crash three years ago that left him disfigured.
In a new Disney+ documentary, entitled simply Flintoff, the former England cricket captain describes the depression and post-traumatic stress that rooted him to his living-room couch for seven months after the accident.
Andrew Flintoff was left with severe scarring after the horrific crash.Credit: Disney+
“I didn’t think I had it in me to get through,” Flintoff tells Disney’s cameras.
“This sounds awful: part of me wishes I’d been killed. Part of me thinks ‘I wish I had died’. I didn’t want to kill myself. I don’t want to mistake the two things. But I was thinking, ‘This would have been so much easier.’”
The documentary also reveals the full details of the crash for the first time. Flintoff was driving a three-wheeled car around the Top Gear racetrack when one of the front wheels came off.
Flintoff says he wasn’t going particularly fast – 65 to 72km/h, he estimates – so he wasn’t wearing a helmet. It was a potentially fatal scenario, but when the car began to roll, his cricketing reflexes kicked in.
Flintoff believes that he only survived because he turned his face directly towards the tarmac.
In the crucial moment after the wheel came off – a fraction of a second which seemed to take an age in his mind – he calculated that meeting the ground side-on would either break his neck or stove in his temple.
He was in agony for half an hour before a helicopter arrived to carry him to St George’s Hospital in nearby Tooting, where he underwent an initial five hours of surgery.
In the documentary, director John Dower shows previously unreleased images of Flintoff’s injuries in the aftermath of the accident.
Andrew Flintoff during his rehabilitation.Credit: Disney+
Meanwhile, his wife Rachael drove down from Manchester, not knowing what state her husband was in. As she explains: “I walked in the room and he was bandaged up. His eyes – I’ve never seen someone so scared in their eyes. He stared at me and I think he was looking at me to know how bad he was.
“I pulled myself together. I said, ‘It’s fine, you’re going to be OK, I can’t believe how amazing you look.’ I called the kids and said, ‘You’ve got to be as strong as you’ve ever been. I don’t want you to look shocked and horrified because that’s going to knock him’.”
Flintoff has four children, including professional cricketers Corey and Rocky. His youngest, Preston, was only 3½ at the time of the accident, and Flintoff says that “he was scared to come near me. He was frightened of my face”.
The accident effectively terminated Top Gear, the much-loved motoring show that Angela Rippon first presented in 1977, and was then turned into a behemoth by Jeremy Clarkson in the early 2000s.
The scene of the crash in December 2022, at Top Gear’s racetrack.Credit: Disney+
Three months after the crash, which happened in December 2022, Flintoff received an apology from the BBC. The following October, he was reported to have received £9 million ($17 million) in compensation for two years’ worth of lost earnings.
In the documentary, Flintoff says that he has had little contact with his fellow Top Gear presenters, Chris Harris and Paddy McGuinness, since the accident.
“I don’t like the word ‘triggering’,” he explains, but clearly he doesn’t need to spend any extra time thinking about an incident that already haunts his waking and sleeping hours.
He also finds himself wondering why he was so ready to throw himself into any stunts his TV producers required, whether on Top Gear or the Sky quiz show A League Of Their Own.
Andrew Flintoff last year with the England cricket team.Credit: Getty Images
“I found out the hard way, eventually,” he admits. “Everybody always wants more. A bigger stunt. Something nobody has seen before. Even a near miss will get viewers.
“I should have been cleverer on this after all the injuries I had in cricket, bowling through injections. In both TV and sport, you get treated like a piece of meat.”
Telegraph, London
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Flintoff is on Disney+ from Friday, April 25.
