Interview: Gareth Thomas
A Welsh rugby legend and gay sporting icon
“Show me someone with a tattoo and I’ll show you someone with an interesting past”
From weights-room advice, to practical workouts for putting talk into action, strength is a theme you will have seen a lot of in Men’s Fitness.
But strength is about more than how much you can lift. There’s strength in forging your own path, in facing your fears and in being a force for change . With that in mind, former Welsh rugby star Gareth Thomas embodies every sense of the word.
A man mountain with 41 international tries in 103 appearances, Thomas excelled in a sport where power and raw physicality are the names of the game. However, it speaks volumes that despite such a glittering sporting career, he is as much of a name outside of rugby as within it.
In 2009, Thomas announced publicly that he was gay, making him the first openly gay professional rugby union player. The following year, he was voted the most influential gay person in the UK. More recently, in September 2019, the 46-year-old announced that he was HIV positive – one day before completing an Ironman – before making the BBC documentary Gareth Thomas: HIV and Me.
During and after rugby, Thomas has made it his mission to challenge stigma at every turn – and his new podcast, Skin Deep, is no different.
Talk us through the premise of Skin Deep.
It’s about exploring the stories behind tattoos.
ere are a lot of misconceptions – and a lot of stigma – around tattooing, but for me and everyone I’ve spoken to there is always signi cant meaning behind every single tattoo. When you start to speak to other people, you realise everyone’s got a story they want to tell through their tattoos. And speaking to someone about their tattoos is a way of really getting to know them – in a much more deep and meaningful way than surface conversation. You nd a di erent narrative about people, because they’re able to tell their own stories through their body art.
Do you think people are becoming more willing to outwardly express themselves with tattoos?
I think the fashion of tattooing will never go away, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing. I’ve never had a tattoo for a fashion reason, but I understand that there are tattoos that
Thomas joins Prince Harry at a Terrence Higgins Trust event ahead of National HIV Testing Week on 8 November 2019 just look really good on people. ey can provide a certain amount of con dence, too, and I think people are much more willing to be bold and brave with showing their tattoos o
What was the rst tattoo you got?
It was the cartoon character Yosemite Sam, when I was 15. I got it done for no real . reason, but it ended up growing into something signi cant. e friend I was with, a guy called Rhydian Phillips who I played rugby with, was a couple of years older and he drove me to get the tattoo done. I got the tattoo done on my leg and I always used to keep it hidden away, but sadly a couple of years later Rhydian passed away, and now
when I look at that tattoo it’s a reminder of a really good mate of mine who’s no longer with us. So even if you have a tattoo that you might regret, it will always represent a moment in time and that very fact makes it worthwhile.
Do you know how many you have now?
I can honestly say I don’t know how many I have. But I’m 46 now and I’ve lived quite a well-documented life of extreme highs and lows, and I do know that every single one of my tattoos re ects my ups, downs and in-betweens. ere’s a famous saying in the tattoo world that goes something like, ‘Show me someone with a tattoo and I’ll show you someone with an interesting past,’ and I think I typify that slogan.
What do your tattoos say about you?
I think you have to take each one on an individual basis, because I’ve had quite a varied life – of varied troubles and varied successes – and my tattoos re ect the eventful life I’ve led. ey also tell me that I’m able to learn from my mistakes and celebrate my achievements. Lots of people assume you would only have a tattoo to celebrate something, but we spoke to Will Bailey – the Paralympic table tennis player, who won gold at Rio 2016 – who got tattoos from Beijing 2008 and London 2012, where he failed to win gold, but he hasn’t got anything to represent his gold-medal win. He is driven by acknowledging when he fell short, and I do the same thing: I choose to mark what I deem to be my failures, so that I can learn from them.
You’ve said that tattoos are a form of self-expression – before you felt able to come out as gay, did you get any tattoos to express your frustrations or fears at keeping those feelings bottled up?
Kind of, in a roundabout way. Because it was all about my identity, rather than my sexuality, at that time: my identity of being Welsh, my identity of being strong, my identity of being proud. ey were things I wanted to be remembered by, regardless of my sexuality. So there are tattoos on my body that mark my heritage and my resilience, rather than being explicitly about my sexuality.
Many sportsman nd it di cult to retire, but did you have a new purpose that made leaving rugby behind easier than it might have been?
No not really, because regardless of your next chapter, when all you ever wanted to be was a rugby player, it’s always going to be di cult to move on from that. When that sole purpose is taken away from you – and at such an early age, because rugby is a short career – it’s di cult. However, saying that, rugby instils a lot of great character traits, and when I retired I sat down and tried to use everything I had learned to enable me to move forward. When you’re a player, you
“Fear is my biggest motivation”
spend a lot of time being afraid – afraid of letting your teammates down, afraid of the opposition, afraid of losing – but it teaches you how to overcome that fear and actually harness it for motivation. Which is exactly what I did when I retired: I had a whole future ahead of me that was full of unknowns, but fear is my biggest motivation. It inspires me to be passionate. If you’re passionate about something, you will always learn to evolve and keep moving forward.
You conquered an Ironman last year, just a day after revealing you were living with HIV. Did that give you added motivation to get round in a good time, or did it leave you feeling emotionally drained?
It was di cult, because it added a lot of pressure. And again, if I hadn’t been a sportsman, I think I might have crumbled under all that pressure. It’s a bit of a cliché, but it is true that I felt privileged to be under that pressure: I had created it, and because
I had created it, I had to go out and perform. People either learn from words or actions, and by revealing that I was living with HIV, I had consciously put the words out there, then I had to go out and do the Ironman to show that it hadn’t a ected me. I had to show people my strength, and I had been in enough pressurised situations to know that I simply had to perform.
How was the race itself?
It was hard, but mainly because it was so fucking long! You get in the sea (and I had only learned to swim about six months previously) and you swim for about an hour, then you have six-and-a-half hours on the bike, then you think, OK just the run to go, but it’s a marathon! I’m so used to all-out, short and sharp exercise that it was hard to pace myself and go slower than I thought I needed to. I also love being part of a team and that’s why rugby meant so much to me – it was like a family – so all of a sudden being an individual was quite hard, and the whole way round I was trying to nd people to run with or cycle with, just to feel like I wasn’t on my own.
You’re obviously still in good nick! How do you stay in shape these days?
I swim a lot in the sea – we live right on the beach and I’ve found a passion for swimming. I train every day, and it is di cult to get out of bed in the mornings sometimes, but I know that I don’t just train for my physical
tness. I’m at an age now when I could easily stop training. But physically I need to feel good, to be able to mentally accept the challenges that come my way. I always took
tness as a given, because I was paid to be a professional sportsman. I’m not paid to keep t any more, but I choose to because everything in my life bene ts.
“Pressure is a privilege”