A recruit to the new TV series of SAS: Who Dares Wins has revealed he was addicted to body-building steroids – until his daughter was born.
Firefighter Pete Wakefield was injecting himself every day with growth hormones plus oral steroids and twice-weekly steroid injections – what he called his special sauce.
The 6ft 5in hulk had so many abscesses from injecting he described himself as like a Swiss cheese rattling with holes. But the birth of Lilly, now 10, made him turn his life around. Pete, 33, who got addicted as a teenager while using the gym after being bullied, told the Sunday People : “I’d been so comfortable lying to myself all of that time.
“But when it came to looking at my daughter, someone I’d created, I thought, ‘Am I going to start her life with a lie? Am I going to hide needles in the house, or am I going to confront the thing that I should have done all along?’
“Had I not had my daughter, I would still be doing it now.”
Pete’s parents kicked him out when he was 18 after finding needles in his room. He joined the fire service but became a full-blown addict weighing 24 stone at the age of 23.
Half a million UK people – mostly young men – are estimated to be addicted to muscle-enhancing drugs.
The addiction left Pete with a prolapsed disc in his back, prolapsed veins, torn shoulder muscles and needing surgery for his abscesses.
Pete, whose wife Claire works with children with learning difficulties, said: “When Lilly was born, I tore my right pectoral muscle on my chest completely off the bone and I needed six months off work for rehabilitation and that was the moment I worked to change it.”
Pete, from Leicestershire, now a fire brigade watch commander, said: “I would always try to hide behind the fact that I’m the big strong guy, but actually there was so much self doubt there. You get in bed at night and tell yourself it’s OK and justify it and sell it to yourself as good.”
Taking on the SAS challenge is a chance for Pete to prove himself.
He joins 19 other ordinary men and women in the punishing 40C jungle heat of Thung Ui in northern Vietnam for the show’s eighth series, which starts tomorrow.
He added: “For me, going into the show, I knew there was a danger of feeling like I wasn’t enough without that ‘special sauce’ that I took.
“But the fact we weren’t enhanced by some artificial thing doesn’t mean that we weren’t enough.”
SAS: Who Dares Wins – Jungle Hell on C4 on Monday at 9pm
