Patrick Foster

I panicked again.

I put a load of like speculative bets on.

One was this sort of outlandish horse racing accumulator where one jockey had to basically win every race that day.

And it happened.

It was a bit of luck that I don't think will ever happen again.

And suddenly the money that I'd started with at the beginning of the week had become about 58,000 pounds, which is obviously an extraordinary amount of money.

It's life-changing sum of money.

I think what I could do with it now with my young family.

But to me at that moment in my life, it was like worthless because it was the number in the top right-hand corner of a computer screen that wasn't actually real.

As far as I was concerned, had to be 10 times that amount, otherwise I was going to be in prison.

So what I decided to do the next day was the most stupid thing you could possibly imagine.

I know that now.

But the only way I can justify it to anybody I ever speak to is by saying weirdly at that moment in my life it felt like the right thing to do and the only option.

I decided to put it all...

on essentially one horse in one horse race the Cheltenham Gold Cup in March 2018 and said to myself at that moment if the horse wins this race I'm going to use that money to pay everybody back yes I know I'll still lose my house and my job but I won't be in debt I won't be in prison life can continue if it doesn't there's no way I can tell anybody what I've just

told you and what's happened over the last week and what i've just done i'm gonna go and kill myself um i watched the horse come second by a couple of lengths and my whole world come crashing down um i look back now and it's the best thing that ever happened to me um but at the time it didn't feel like it's my whole world came crashing down um and to cut a long story short i i

So over the course of the next few days, I attempted suicide in different ways and eventually was at a train station minutes away from doing the unthinkable and then made the best decision I've ever made, and that was to tell someone.

I didn't know who to tell.

But the only person I could tell was my best mate, who's my little brother.

Didn't want to call him, didn't want him to hear the state that I was in.