Nick Matthew’s mother makes the best Yorkshire puddings so he knew something was seriously wrong. Earlier that day he had reversed his car over an ice machine used to treat his chronic ankle. He says it provoked the meltdown. He took his wife and daughter to his parents for Sunday lunch, but excused himself and went for a walk alone. He was gone for two hours. “Everybody was worried and there was I, sitting on a park bench,” Matthew says. “I was on the verge of what you read about, athletes getting into depression. I was on the bottom rung but it’s a chicken and egg cycle of self-pity and guilt and I could understand how people got to the second and third rungs.”

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