I wish I’d been kinder: Keep-fit king Joe Wicks reveals his guilt over love split
HE HAS reportedly been put forward for an official honour for his efforts in raising money for health workers from his lockdown workouts. But keep-fit king Joe Wicks has admitted that he hasn’t always put kindness first, confessing in a new interview that he treated his former girlfriend Caroline Ekström badly.
Asked who he would most like to apologise to, the 33-year-old replied: ‘I would like to say sorry to my exgirlfriend. I was with her for ten years. I wish I’d treated her with more respect and been kinder at the end.’
The candid comments are the first suggestion that their split in 2016 was anything other than amicable. It came months before Wicks met his wife, ex-Page Three girl Rosie Jones, with whom he now has two young children.
Wicks told his 2.4million YouTube subscribers that Rosie, 29, was ‘the hottest substitute teacher ever’ when she recently stood in for him leading the online workouts after he suffered a wrist injury.
But for years, friends had expected Ms Ekström to be at his side when his boundless energy propelled him to success.
The Swedish fashion company boss – who bears a striking similarity to Ms Jones – met Wicks in Byron Bay, New South Wales, while they were both backpacking in 2006.
They returned to Britain to live together while Wicks studied sports science and she took a degree in business management at Kingston University.
His first faltering foray into the public eye was as a contestant in a newspaper modelling competition in 2008 when ‘student and part-time labourer Joe, 22, said: ‘I’d love to do this for a job. Working with gorgeous women all day? Brilliant!’ He added: ‘My girlfriend Caroline reckons I’d be great at it.’
He didn’t win the contest but as he began to build up a following on the internet, he often mentioned Caroline in interviews. In 2016, he told The Mail on Sunday how his first ‘get lean in 15 minutes’ Instagram clip received just 98 likes, a far cry from the hundreds of thousands he gets these days from his 3.7 million Instagram followers. But while his friends regarded the item as ‘silly’, he said it was Ms Ekström who rang him to say: ‘I like your video.’
By then, Ms Ekström had graduated, worked for several highend fashion companies and set up Oldstrom, a fashion import firm. Asked in early 2016 if they planned to get married, Mr Wicks replied: ‘Of course we are.’
But by that summer, he admitted that travelling the world with a busy schedule had put a strain on their relationship: ‘We broke up two months ago, just before
I went to America for work.’ Unlike his recent admission, however, he said then that the split was amicable. ‘We just grew apart,’ he added. ‘But we’re still really good friends. There was no nastiness.’ Ms Ekström declined to comment last night, and Wicks’s agent did not respond.