Flintoff’s battles remind us our superstars are human after all
HOW do we want our sporting heroes served up? Hard or soft-boiled? Steel-plated supermen or tender and vulnerable? It is a question worth asking as Freddie Flintoff bares his soul about his 20-year battle with bulimia in a BBC documentary to be screened tomorrow.
Conjure up an image of a champion and it is of a physical outlier who operates on another strata, someone to look up to for the rest of us mere mortals. In other words, someone like Flintoff at the peak of his powers.
He was the cricketer who emptied the bars, the all-rounder a captain would turn to when something extraordinary was required, the player who transcended the sport.
When the greatest Ashes was unfolding in 2005, taking cricket into another realm, he was its powerhouse poster boy. That wide-armed, stone-faced wicket celebration, as the adulation from the stands rained down, saw him sculpted in white as a Lancastrian Greek god.
Yet all the while he was guarding a secret totally at odds with the public image.
In ‘Freddie Flintoff: Living With Bulimia’, he walks us around the Lord’s pavilion to the toilets where – during the first Test – he would deliberately throw up his lunch.
Lord’s, he shares, was an excellent ground for vomiting because of the lavatories’ proximity to the England dressing room and the privacy that the floor-length cubicle doors afforded.
Where other players ranked grounds on suitability for reverse swing or fifth-day turn, Flintoff assessed them on their bulimia-friendliness. None of his teammates knew. In the hour-long film, Flintoff talks about the body image issues which started after public criticism of his weight at the start of his England career and the extent to which they continue to affect his life. He still feels guilt every time he eats and made himself sick as recently as this year.
In speaking up, he is attempting to help those – particularly men – who suffer in shamed silence with an eating disorder. It is a compelling watch and it was brave of Flintoff to discuss his situation in public. At 42 and a father of four, he finally feels able to do so now – even if opening up is not easy.
“I’m generally worried about the reaction when this goes out,” he said. “I don’t like being vulnerable.”
It is all too easy to forget that the supermen doing incredible things on a pitch or a track are human beings with human issues like the rest of us. Maybe that is how we want it to be. Maybe it is wishful thinking. Maybe we just want to believe in the myth of the indomitable miracle man.
IF Flintoff had talked about his bulimia during his career, would he still have been Super Fred out in the middle or would the armour have been pierced? The ‘failings’ everyone knew of at the time – the alcohol binges that turned England’s 2005 victory parade into a stag do and the late-night ‘Fredalo’ incident in the West Indies that cost him the captaincy – only added to the hard-drinking, hard-playing image but bulimia carries with it an altogether different stigma.
Would he have received sympathy and backing from the British public if he had owned up to a problem widely – but incorrectly – linked to teenage girls? You would have hoped so. But in the workplace?
Professional sport is an unforgiving environment.
Perceived weaknesses are preyed upon. Would the Aussie players have put a supportive arm around his shoulder just as Flintoff did to the broken Brett Lee after Edgbaston?
Remember David Warner’s ruthless sledging of Jonathan Trott when he had his mental health troubles in 2013 and formulate your own answer.
Would the Aussie crowds have gone easy on him in 2007 when their side was inflicting a 5-0 revenge thrashing? Would even some of Flintoff’s own teammates have understood at the time?
The sad thing is that while keeping quiet back then meant failing to deal with a disorder that persists to this day, it was the wise choice professionally.
The blessing is that he has found the strength to do so now.
As he says in the documentary: “You’re meant to be tough, you’re meant to be strong. If you give something away, then you’re weak.
“That becomes exhausting. That becomes so difficult. The strength is telling people, the strength is being able to have a conversation and own up to whatever your weaknesses are.”