Candice Warner shares her lowest moments, finding love and bouncing back in memoir Running Strong
Candice Warner reveals she ‘felt like a criminal’ as cricket’s infamous ball-tampering scandal exploded around husband David – and why she believed it was ‘all my fault’.
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Candice Warner is the “happiest I’ve ever been”, personally and professionally, after years of highs and lows in the public eye.
And as she prepares to launch a candid memoir, she is ready to frankly address two of the most bruising episodes in her life – revealing what really happened inside “media firestorms” that erupted 11 years apart.
In a wide-ranging interview and photoshoot with Stellar and an extract from her book Running Strong, the champion Ironwoman and TV personality for the first time opens up fully about a moment that “ruined my life” – her 2007 encounter as a young single woman with footballer Sonny Bill Williams – and vents her anger at how it was handled in the aftermath.
The 38-year-old also describes her experience at the centre of the 2018 Sandpapergate scandal, when cricket ace husband David Warner was involved in a ball-tampering plot during Australia’s tour of South Africa and sent home in disgrace.
“There were policemen around us, and also ill-will. I felt like a criminal, returning for justice to be served,” she writes in the extract, published today in News Corp Sunday newspapers, describing the family’s return to find huge crowds waiting at Sydney Airport.
“Dave stopped and spoke briefly to the cameras. He was hurting. I could hear it in his voice, and that hurt me deeply. There was nothing to do but put our heads down and keep going. I’d learned that,” she adds, referring to how she tried to cope after the 2007 incident, when she was photographed in a hotel bathroom with Williams.
She was mocked about that encounter for years afterwards – but she reveals today that “nobody ever asked” exactly what happened, instead preferring to make lewd assumptions when it was in reality nothing more than a kiss.
“At the core of that was a young woman who didn’t do anything wrong … The only thing I did wrong was go into a place I shouldn’t have been,” she says in her Stellar interview and accompanying appearance on the Something To Talk About podcast. “That was it. Yet it ruined my life. It ruined parts of my family’s life.”
Looking back, she is angry that she was convinced to make a public apology in the days after, saying: “It blows my mind now that that’s the way we all thought was the best way to approach that situation. Now it infuriates me. It angers me.”
That incident was fanned back to life in 2018, when South Africans tormented the Warners, on-field and off, with vile references to it. Worse was to come as Warner believed that the trolling somehow led to the ball-tampering. “I felt, deep down, that it was all my fault.”
In frank detail, the extract – which also covers topics ranging from falling in love, to bonding with Schapelle Corby on SAS Australia, to finding peace through the power of running and family – describes Warner’s unique view of Sandpapergate unfolding from the inside out, including her husband’s distress after being grilled by officials.
“When Dave came back, he kept it together for only a few seconds before he broke down in tears. He told me he was to accept the blame for devising a ball-tampering plan, which was known about by captain Steve Smith and enacted by Cameron Bancroft.
“He said he was being sent home immediately. I grabbed him and held him. He just kept apologising, over and over and over. Eventually he calmed down and I asked him what had happened in the meeting. He told me he feared that he may never play cricket again.”
Both extract and interview go beyond media controversies, with revealing, touching – and at times amusing – insights into Warner’s life and mindset.
She tells how she learned to love winning at sport from an early age, which no doubt contributed to her becoming an Ironwoman at 14, at the time the youngest ever to do so – although with the wisdom of hindsight she reveals: “I was so happy, but back then I didn’t completely understand what this qualification meant … I would do the work, but while I was gaining skills, fitness and strength, I was missing out on time as a child and as a schoolgirl. I was going to be an Ironwoman when I wasn’t even yet a woman.”
Warner also candidly discusses a period in life where she broke down – and how a counsellor prescribed running as part of her recovery. “It changed my life,” she writes. “It’s one of the best coping mechanisms I have ever found and looking back now, I think it may have even saved my life.”
On a lighter note, she describes how she fell for David, the father of her three children – despite at their initial meeting thinking “he was possibly the rudest man I’d ever met” – and how their courtship developed despite being, literally, a world apart: he in the UK playing cricket and she in Australia.
“Now I’m the happiest I’ve ever been,” she writes, “and I wouldn’t change anything for the world.”
Running Strong by Candice Warner will be published by HarperCollins on April 19 and is available for pre-order now.
Originally published as Candice Warner shares her lowest moments, finding love and bouncing back in memoir Running Strong