JOE’S TEARS
He’s the smiling face of lockdown fitness, but Joe Wicks has revealed that his childhood was anything but happy…
It’s hard to imagine ‘Britain’s PE teacher’, Joe Wicks, having a care in the world. But the lockdown hero, 33, whose classes for the past 13 weeks and counting have notched up 60 million viewers, has made a shock admission – his childhood was filled with anger over his drug-addicted father, Gary.
‘ When I was a teenager,
I was angry. I don’t remember seeing drugs used around me, but the after-effects of seeing him stoned or high...’ Joe said.
‘I was just so angry,’ he added, recalling one of
Gary’s relapses. ‘I remember thinking, I don’t want to talk to him. I hate him.’
Choked up with emotion, he said: ‘I didn’t hate my dad. I just hated what the drugs were doing to him… I only said it once, and I have never really admitted that. It was just a reaction, and I felt so bad afterwards. I didn’t hate my dad. What a horrible thing to say.’
Gary, a roofer, is now in recovery from heroin addiction, and Joe says his anger has passed. ‘I love my dad… the antidote to addiction is connection and love, and that is what I’ve learnt.’
But it wasn’t just his father’s addiction that shaped his turbulent childhood.
Speaking to Lauren Laverne on last Tuesday morning’s Desert Island Discs on BBC Radio 4, the body coach added his mum, Raquela, a social worker, suffered from obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).
‘My bedroom carpet was pitchblack, so every little speck of dirt and dust would show up, and my mum would want me to hoover it twice a day. I was like four, five or six years old,’ he recalled.
Yet despite his family’s issues, Joe says he always felt loved. ‘I’m not someone who dwells on the past… I’m the man I am today because of what my dad’s been through, and because of what my mum’s been through.”
Now married to Rosie, a model, and a dad himself to daughter, Indie, two, and son, Marley, six months, Joe has managed to move on, finding comfort and structure in his fitness regime.
‘I was scared of it, and I got into exercise and fitness, so his mistake changed my life. I don’t regret anything I’ve gone through, or anything I have been through with my mum and dad, I’m just proud of who I am.’
You should be, Joe.
‘I didn’t hate my dad. I was just so angy ’