Gareth Thomas says he struggled when his wife left him.
Gareth Thomas, the former rugby international, has spoken for the first time of the agonising pain of his wife leaving him after he came out as gay.
The ex-Wales captain told how he made several suicide attempts after confessing to his wife Jemma in 2006 that he had been secretly homosexual throughout their five-year marriage.
In a new book Thomas says that the night his wife left him, he dressed in his best grey suit issued by the Welsh Rugby Union and headed to the swimming pool of his home set upon drowning himself.
He explained in an interview on Saturday how he had fought to become one of the toughest players on the pitch in an attempt to hide his sexuality, which had been clear to him from the age of 16.
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“It was like, ‘I’m going to make it hard for you to ever imagine, because I’m going to be a beast of a man and I am going to be – good at rugby, which is everything that society is telling me I shouldn’t be.’?”
He finally opened up to his wife eight years ago when he realised his attraction to other men was not going to disappear in the way he had hoped, despite being “so in love with her”.
Thomas, who retired from rugby in October 2011 and now works for a teaching company, has written a memoir, Proud, detailing his journey towards being openly gay.
In the book he describes the night he returned home from playing rugby, to find his wife had finally walked out on him.
He wrote: “A form of madness gripped me that first night after Jemma left. I needed her presence, so I invented it. I climbed into her wardrobe, and sprayed her favourite perfume, Chanel’s Coco Mademoiselle, around the interior.
“I pulled her clothes off the hangers and shelves, and buried myself in them. In my warped state of mind, it was my only way of getting her back. I sensed her spirit, savoured her scent. I was in her space, her sphere.
“I missed her so badly, and hated myself for what I had inflicted on her.”
Thomas, 40, who is now in a happy relationship with his boyfriend Ian Baum, insists there are no lingering tensions between him and his then wife, who has since remarried.