James Cracknell on recovering from a brain injury and the importance of asking for help
The double Olympic gold medallist tells Lisa Salmon how counselling and cutting-edge scans have helped him rediscover his old self.
Recovering from a traumatic brain injury has been a long journey for former Olympic rower James Cracknell.
But 15 years after the wing mirror of a fuel tanker smashed into his head as he was cycling in the US, the double Olympic gold medallist is close to being back to normal, following a gargantuan struggle to understand the way his injury affected his personality, mental health and capabilities.
It was a struggle that cost him his marriage to the TV presenter Beverley Turner, the mother of his three children, as the damage to the frontal lobe of his brain caused personality changes, memory problems, and epilepsy, as well as leaving him unable to recognise people’s faces, and losing his sense of taste and smell.
But now, thanks to counselling, groundbreaking new scans that have helped identify his specific areas of brain damage and the behaviour linked to it, plus a simple acceptance that he needed help, the Olympian who once described himself as “the man who used to be James Cracknell” is now not far off being the original James again.
Speaking to mark World Head Injury Awareness Day (March 20), Cracknell, 52, recalls that after the accident: “My ex said to me ‘you’ve become more of you’, but if I’m looking honestly at my characteristics, they’re stubborn, competitive, determined and pretty unforgiving – and if those characteristics are heightened, it’s not good.
“They’re very good traits in what I used to do, in a sporting environment, but they’re not so useful for a happy family life.
“But I’m definitely more like I was before now than I was five years ago.”
Cracknell doesn’t shy away from the way he could behave after the accident, calling himself “a d***” and admitting: “I think it’s harder on other family members, because a lot of sympathy goes to the person who had the accident, rather than the people around them. So ‘he gets all the sympathy but he’s a d***’.”
Nevertheless, although he wholeheartedly agrees he was “very fortunate” to survive the accident, and sustain no other injuries, what frustrates him more than anything is people assuming he can’t do things because of his head injury.
“The biggest thing to get over was people close to me, and people I didn’t know, placing a limit on what they thought I could do compared to before the accident, and then everything I did ever since was viewed through the prism of the brain injury, rather than I’d always made dodgy decisions.”
The former athlete, who won golds in the coxless fours at the Sydney and Athens Olympics, as well as six World Championship titles, admits that for many years after the accident he had a mental barrier to accepting he needed help.
“I think one of the big, big barriers, especially having done sport, is admitting or asking for help,” he says. “Because I was so used to sorting my own problems out, I just thought ‘I can do that, I can do that’. I didn’t want to ask for help.
“So the first barrier for me was being able to ask for help and thinking I needed it, and actually realising asking for help is a sign of strength, not a sign of weakness. Prioritising therapy and counselling is really important.”
Cracknell, who successfully won compensation for the accident after a one-and-a-half-year legal fight in America, didn’t have counselling until around 2018 – eight years after the accident – and says: “What I’m not good at is if a routine changes or if we plan something, and then it changes. I feel more and more inflexible about that, which is very difficult when plans change all the time.
“I have the reaction more of a teenager than an adult. But what I’m better at now, through therapy, is being more self-reflective, and just saying ‘OK, don’t be a d***’. I didn’t have that before – I just thought everyone else was being a d***’.”
In addition, he feels his emotions were “really dampened at the top” by the head injury – so, for example, in the past if he was having a nice time with his kids, it’s occurred to him that he should have been feeling happier than he actually did.
“It definitely helps to be more reflective,” he explains. “I think getting divorced and not living with the kids means I cherish the time I do have with them in a different way.”
Another improvement is that Cracknell, who now coaches rowing, says he thinks more before answering questions – a trait demonstrated by occasional pauses before he speaks. “That’s because after the accident I really didn’t think at all, I had no filter, and good or bad, it would come out. I think I’m definitely more cognisant of other people now,” he says.
He still has counselling, although not as frequently, having couples ‘pre-counselling’ with his second wife Jordan Connell, who he married in 2021. “My wife is American, and it’s a very different attitude to therapy over there,” he says. “If couples go to counselling here, normally it’s at the end of the relationship, rather than just after we got married. It’s actually very useful not to have a stigma around it.”
As well as finding counselling useful, Cracknell – who has also taken part in a number of daunting endurance challenges, including the Atlantic Rowing Race and the race to the South Pole, both with his friend Ben Fogle – has recently had cutting-edge brain scans that revealed the full extent of his injury.
The scans, arranged by the brain injury lawyers Coulthursts, showed significant changes to the structure and function of Cracknell’s brain that weren’t apparent from standard MRI images, including elevated gamma waves in his brain’s face-processing area, explaining the difficulties he’s had with recognising familiar faces.
He explains that after the accident, he’d go to dinners and meet sponsors, but wouldn’t recognise them the next week. “I think it quite annoyed them,” he says, “so if I was going to a dinner I’d see who was on my table, then try and get a picture of them, and work out if I’d seen them before so I could then have a coping strategy.”
He adds: “Understanding the extent of the damage earlier would have given me the tools to adapt much sooner. Instead of trial and error over 15 years, I could have developed coping strategies immediately.
“If I’d known then what I know now, so many things could have been different.”
James Cracknell is an ambassador for Coulthursts brain injury lawyers, and a patron of Riverside Counselling Service.