Freddie Flintoff’s wife Rachel heartbreakingly revealed she warned kids about his shocking appearance before they saw him – after she fought back tears in the hospital. Worried Rachel rushed to hospital after she heard about Freddie’s Top Gear crash at Dunsfold test track in 2022.
Looking back she recalled: “I got a phone call. Andy’s been in an accident, in Top Gear, but we don’t have much information. I think they might take him to the nearest hospital, but it sounds like it’s just his teeth or something. I think everything’s fine. I put the phone down, and I didn’t think much of it to begin with. It just kind of escalated very quick.”
Rachel continued: “I wasn’t getting any information. I didn’t know how he was injured, and I just started just grabbing all my stuff, and just thought ‘I’m just gonna head to London, and then hopefully someone will tell me where he is’.”
In the documentary, viewers hear from someone who treated him on the day and says Freddie had “a mixture of hard tissue and soft tissue injuries, broken teeth, lost teeth and elements of the upper jaw bone that were also fractured and displaced”. He then had an initial five hours of surgery trying to begin to put his face back together.
Sounding tearful, Rachel added: “When I did see him, I walked in the room, and he was just in the bed, and he was bandaged up. Like his eyes, I’ve never seen someone so scared in their eyes. And he just stared at me, and I just think he was looking at me to know how bad he was.
“So to be fair, I totally pulled myself together, and I just didn’t cry. I didn’t, I just said, ‘it’s fine. You’re gonna be okay. I can’t believe how amazing you look’.
“Before we got home, I did, I did call the kids, and I did say to them, ‘you’ve just got to be as strong as you’ve ever been. Your dad does look different at the moment. It’s gonna get better, but I don’t want you to look shocked and horrified, because that’s gonna knock him’.
“And that was hard, but Andy doesn’t know I’ve ever done that. I was so grateful to all those people, I still had a husband, the kids still had their dad.”
Speaking on the Disney+ documentary, Rachel also recalls how she first met Freddie before he was a cricketing superstar. They met in 2002, married in 2005 and have four children.
Rachel said: “He introduced himself as Andrew, and I’ve always called him Andrew. We started talking, and then we didn’t stop talking. He was funny. I know he made me laugh, and I think the more I was talking to him, the more I was like, ‘Oh, you’re really lovely’.
“I didn’t actually know who Andy was at the time, not in a bad way. But I can’t put my finger on it, there was just something about him that was different.
“He takes it really negatively, but what I say to him, ‘he had potential, and he’s like, ‘Oh, I had potential, she tried to change me’, but I never meant that at all. It was just something in him that I knew he was just, there was so much more gonna happen.”
She also talks about his boozing when he was a player and also talks about him hitting some lows both during his career and after the car crash.
But looking ahead and being more positive, she says that since he has got back into cricket via coaching teams, she has seen a real change in him and his outlook on life.
Towards the end of the film, Rachel said: “It’s like back where he belongs, for a girl who knew nothing about cricket, or very little about cricket, it’s definitely become a big part of my life, and when Andrew needed it most, cricket was there for him.
“I mean, it sounds a bit weird saying a bit over the top to say, but I do think cricket saved him. It gave him a reason for being again.”
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