Andrew Flintoff wished he had died in the aftermath of his horror Top Gear crash and admits 'I thought my face had come off' as harrowing new details emerge - including how his cricket instincts saved his life
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- Freddie Flintoff suffered horrific, near-fatal car crash filming Top Gear in 2022
- He has spoken candidly and at length about the impact of trauma and injuries
- Flintoff said he 'didn't think he had a face' and 'part of me wishes I'd been killed'
Andrew Flintoff wished he’d died in the immediate aftermath of the car crash horror that sparked fears he would be left without a face.
Flintoff, 47, made the admission in a harrowing television documentary released by Disney+ on Friday, saying: ‘After the accident, I didn’t think I had it in me to get through. This sounds awful: part of me wishes I had been killed, part of me thinks "I wish I had died."
'I didn’t want to kill myself, don’t mistake the two things, but I was thinking "this would have been so much easier."'
The former England captain also revealed that the incident while filming for BBC TV show Top Gear in December 2022 - in which the Morgan Super 3 three-wheeled sports car he was driving flipped, dragging him across the tarmac of Dunsfold Aerodrome in Surrey - replays over and over like a movie in his mind.
‘My biggest fear was I didn't think I had a face. I thought my face had come off,’ Flintoff said.
‘In some ways it would have been easier if I'd gone unconscious and then been unconscious for a week or two, and you wake up and the stitches are out, but I remember everything.
‘We’re probably doing about 40, 45 (mph). They were just showing me how to get the car going sideways and the wheel came up on the front. It's a funny thing rolling a car because there's a point of no return and everything slows down. It's so weird.’
Flintoff compared the reaction time involved to his former role as an international batsman.
‘You get 0.4 of a second to make your mind up, where the ball is going, what shot you are you going to play, how you are going to move your feet, and as it started going over, I looked at the ground, and I knew if I get here on this side,’ he said, pointing to the right side of his head, ‘then I break my neck. If I get hit on the temple, I am dead. The best chance is go face down.
‘My head got hit, but then I got dragged out, and the car went over, and I went over the back of the car, and then pulled face down on the runway, about 50 metres underneath the car, and then it hit the grass, and then flipped back in.’
Airlifted to St George’s Hospital in Tooting, Flintoff was being operated on soon after arrival by Mr Jahrad Haq, an oral and maxillofacial surgeon.
‘I was on call that day and received a phone call from the A and E consultant. A lot of the injuries we have are managed at a more junior level before escalating to the consultant, so I knew something was up,’ Mr Haq said.
‘His injuries overall, for the past 20 years of seeing maxillofacial trauma, I'd probably put in the top five.
‘He had a mixture of hard tissue and soft tissue injuries, broken teeth, lost teeth, elements of the upper jaw bone that were also fractured and displaced.
‘His soft tissue injuries were very complex. It's very unusual that you lose soft tissue, that you lose skin, and he'd lost a really significant portion of his upper lip, the skin and some of the underlying muscle and also his lower lip.’
There were added complications, though. ‘These wounds were never going to be clean wounds. He's scraped his face along the tarmac. There's going to be grit, dirt, and the initial surgery took about five hours.
'You’ve just got to get the anatomy back to how it was in the first place. It's like a jigsaw puzzle, and almost always all the pieces are there. In Andrew's case, they weren’t.’
The 98-minute documentary shows the graphic images of a blood-soaked and battered Flintoff being delivered to hospital and of him post-op: his nose, lips and cheeks littered with stitches, eyes swollen and black.
Recalling the first visit to comfort the father of four in his hospital bed, Flintoff's wife Rachael said: ‘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 just said, it's fine. You're going to be okay. I can't believe how amazing you look.
‘Before we got home, I did have 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 going to get better, but I don't want you to look shocked and horrified, because that's going to knock him.’
Crippled by anxiety, Flintoff remained housebound for the next seven months, only venturing out for appointments with doctors and dentists.
He eventually built up the courage to face the public again during the 2023 Ashes, initially watching incognito alongside long-term friend Rob Key, the ECB’s men’s director of cricket. Soon afterwards, he launched a coaching career with the help of Key that has since seen him take charge of England Lions.
‘When Andrew needed it most, cricket was there for him. Cricket saved him. It gave him a reason for being again,’ said Rachael.
At the same time, he has put a TV career behind him, revealing that self-preservation was partly responsible for him losing touch with Top Gear co-presenters Chris Harris and Paddy McGuinness.
He says he got emotional giving Harris a hug at their first post-crash meet-up recently, but has not spoken to McGuinness at all.
‘Part of it is for myself a little bit,’ Flintoff said. ‘Their careers have been altered as well, so I feel, not guilty, but bad for them. Also, what happened gets dragged up enough in my own head without adding to that.’
Flintoff is available exclusively on Disney+ in the UK and Ireland from Friday, April 25.
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