secret

Break up: The divorce between Gareth and Jemma will soon be finalised, but he says they are still in love with each other and remain friends.

As a young man he bonded with rugby mates in the pub over tales of sexual conquests, and flirted with pretty girls eager to bag a sporting hero.

After his marriage in 2002 to teenage sweetheart Jemma – the woman he called his ‘rock’ – he spoke movingly of their desire to become parents and the heartbreak of her suffering three miscarriages.

And if anyone dared to suggest he was anything other than 100 per cent straight, Gareth ‘Alfie’ Thomas was prepared to make them see the error of their ways. With his fists, if necessary.

But, as he admits, it was all a pretence, a fragile artifice – and one which came crashing down around his ears on November 4, 2006, following a Wales game in Cardiff.

Breaking down in tears in the changing rooms of the Millennium Stadium, Gareth finally realised he could not go on living a lie. Keeping his true sexuality a secret was destroying him.

That secret, which he’d kept hidden his entire career, was – he admits now – ‘like a tight knot in my stomach, always threatening to seep out’.

He says: ‘I was like a ticking bomb. I thought I could suppress it, keep it locked away in some dark corner of myself, but I couldn’t.

‘It was who I was, and I just couldn’t ignore it any more.

‘I’d been through every emotion under the sun trying to deal with this.

‘You wake up one morning thinking: “I can handle it. Everything is fine,” and the next morning you don’t want anyone to see your face, because you think that if people look at you, they will know.’

That summer, he had confessed the truth to his devastated wife Jemma, unable to cope with the guilt of deceiving her.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/rugbyunion/article-1237064/British-Lions-rugby-legend-Gareth-Thomas-Its-ended-marriage-nearly-driven-suicide-Now-time-tell-world-truth–Im-gay.html#ixzz0aLCHJHRY