Warning: this article contains content some readers may find distressing
The full extent of Freddie Flintoff’s injuries after his horror crash have now shown in shocking new photos.
His new documentary has just landed on Disney+, airing the incident that took place during Top Gear filming for the first time.
Flintoff takes a look into the life of the sporting legend, including his return to cricket following the ‘life-altering car crash’ in December 2022 where says he’d ‘wished he died’.
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“I remember everything about it… it’s so vivid,” he says in the trailer, having recently told Jonathan Ross that there’s not just the ‘physical scars’ he’s left with, but the impact on ‘the mental side’ too.
Flintoff goes into graphic detail during his new doc, as he reveals he thought his ‘face had come off’.
“I was frightened to death,” he adds, as he waited for 30-40 minutes in unbearable agony until an air ambulance arrived.
The now-47-year-old was taken to St George’s Hospital, London, from the crash site at Dunsfold Aerodrome, Surrey, where surgeons acted quickly to piece him back together.
And the shocking photos show the disfigurement of his face upon arrival at the hospital as well as during and after five hours of surgery.
He can be soon totally battered and bruised with blood all over his face as he’d landed face-first in the accident.
One image shows him with a patch to the ride side of his mouth, with stiches going across his cheek, nose and forehead. Complete with puffy black eyes, Flintoff looks practically unrecognisable.
Flintoff had a mixture of hard and soft tissue injuries as well as broken and lost teeth as well as parts of his jaw that were fractured and displaced.
Speaking in the doc surgeon Jahrad Haq admits that Freddie's injuries were among the most severe he’d ever dealt with in his career, putting them in the ‘top five’ of that category.
Haq added: “He lost a really significant portion of his upper lip - the skin and some of the underlying muscle - and also his lower lip.”
Having been brought in on call, the oral and maxillfocail surgeon added: “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.”
With his wife warning his kids before they got home that he looked ‘different at the moment’, Flintoff admits he found it particularly difficult to go through everything that followed, including being there for them while he was in so much pain both mentally and physically.
He bravely says: "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'."
Flintoff is now streaming on Disney+.
Topics: Freddie Flintoff, Top Gear, Celebrity, Health, Disney Plus, Documentaries
Jess Battison