Neil Adams
speaker
376 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2024
last heard Apr 2024
Neil Adams’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
That kind of dark period in my life, you know, and I never, ever, ever, you know, did it go through my mind, anything else, but it definitely affected me and I was on a downward kind of spiral in a lot of different ways.
And, um, would still even, you know, I mean, we, we have an amazing marriage and we have an amazing family and everything's great, but I still wake up sometimes and I'll say, I've just dreamt, you know, that, and it's the same reoccurring dream where I'm trying to get somewhere and I'm trying to put it right. You know, and I, I've got.
this chance of putting this Olympic final right, you know, in, in, in this dream, I've got a chance to doing it, but I can't get there. And the traffic stopping me or something stops me. And I, you know, and then I wake up and I'm sweating and it's, and you think, well, after all this time, that's not possible, but it is. And it happens. Yeah.
Well, you know, his team doctor and coach, he came up to me afterwards and said, I'm just really sorry. And that's all they said is I'm just really sorry. They were sorry because, you know, obviously the obvious sadness about that, you know, and of course everybody takes their – you know, I went actually – Two and a, was it three weeks later, the German Open.
So he had to compete in the German Open three weeks later. So I went over to fight him and beat him in the final of the German Open. And it didn't do anything for me because it was a much tighter match. He was a lot closer. He had a lot more confidence coming in. So he fought me a lot differently. And then it was me pulling it back. and just managing to win in the final.
And I thought, well, that might appease, it appeased nothing, didn't do anything.
It means so much. And I think, you know, but I've got to say this, and this is honestly, you know, if it meant that if I'd have won that Olympic Games and it had to change my life into a different direction, which I probably would have not competed in the 88 Olympic Games then. All right.
So if it had changed my life and then I didn't have, I didn't meet my wife and I, you know, didn't have my family that I've got now. I wouldn't swap that, what I've got now, for anything.
Yeah. And it is, isn't it? You know, and I think that there's a lot of Olympic champions and world champions that win and then are forgotten. And I said to Nikki, I said, my wife, I said, I don't want to be forgotten and I want to be remembered. So if I'm going to do anything, anything I do, if I'm going to do commentary or whatever it is, or coaching, I want to do coaching to a high level.
And I want to commentate at a high level. I remember the first commentary I ever did, it was terrible. And I just thought, I've got to do better than this. And I thought, I need to do it well. And I've got to do it professionally.
I think great champions are made up of the people that handle it in the right way. And you could say, well, I don't like losing. And you could throw your dummy out the pram and you can be a bad loser in front of everybody. And actually, people pick up on that very, very quickly. You know what it's like in broadcasting, right? Somebody has a bad word to say about somebody.
But actually, the ones that endear themselves to you are the ones that handle it in the right way, the correct way. It doesn't mean that you've got to like it. I didn't like it. And I thought that I handled it certainly in later years in the right way. And I like to see athletes do it in the right way, you know, and I think that it's a make or break situation. It's not all the contests they win.
It's the one that they lose and then how they pick themselves up and handle themselves after. So I think that that is a big one for me. And also I, I mean, I went through, you know, obviously a later divorce, and that was difficult on my son, really difficult on Ashley.
And then I was – and I think that some of that was the fact that I was, you know, kind of – I wasn't drinking all the time, but I was drinking in excess at the wrong times, you know. And I think that that's what a lot of people do sometimes is that – They use it for the wrong reasons, you know, and I used to hear it.
I hear it now all the time, you know, and it's that, you know, I need to knock the edge off and I need to just forget. And I need to, you know, and you need to be in a fuzzy place for a while. And I had a lot of time in a fuzzy place and I needed to get rid of that, you know, and I needed to clear my head.
I think, you know, definitely, you know, the fact that my marriage, first marriage didn't work, you know, and that was, you know, it's a mix of things that, you know, between us and, and then, you know, so that's not where I wanted to be at the time. And yeah, the effects that it had on my son. And it took a long time for him then to come around and to trust me again, you know, and to have belief.
He always had belief in me, but to trust me again. And then I think that that was low. And I think that, you know, when I look back, is that a lot of my bad decisions were when I was in that fuzzy kind of haze and that it got progressively worse. That got progressively worse to the degree where it was, you know, trying to hide it and trying to hide how much.
And I was kind of a functioning kind of drunk. You know, I think you could probably say that. And, you know, I was functioning. I was still able to – I was still training most days. crazily enough, you know, I was training to kind of mask it and cover it. And that was probably my savior that I was still, you know, because I remember I said to my wife, I said to Nikki, I'm probably the fittest.
If I'm, you know, a drunk, then I'm a fittest drunk in the world. She said, yeah, you probably are actually, you know, I was in great condition for a drunk.
I had periods of depression. I can honestly say that my depression wasn't that bad. Although I did, you know, when it's like anything that gives you an up, you know, it gives you an even bigger down, doesn't it? You know, and so I hated that feeling and also hated myself for letting it happen because I have got this really bizarre feeling
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