Retired jump jockey Richard Dunwoody contemplated suicide as he battled the slimming disease anorexia, he revealed today.
Dunwoody was so worried that he was too heavy to make it as a jockey that he starved himself to the point of collapse.
At 16 he was taken to hospital when his weight became perilously low and needed lengthy treatment to help him overcome the disease.
'At the time, I couldn`t see life getting better and suicidal thoughts entered my head. I thought that if I threw myself under a bus or off a bridge, then it would end everyone`s problems,' Dunwoody said in his autobiography Obsessed, serialised in The Daily Mail.
'Keeping thin had taken over my whole life,' he wrote. 'Basically, I had starved myself to be a jockey but in doing so had lost the strength necessary to ride horses.'
Dunwoody said the anorexia was sparked as a youngster when a friend`s father joked that he was too heavy ever to become a jockey.
The remark prompted him to buy diet books and count calories until his weight dropped well below eight stones.
The 'emaciated' teenager eventually collapsed at his boarding school and was taken to hospital.
Dunwoody, who retired last year after riding a record 1,699 winners over jumps in Britain, also revealed he was so obsessed with winning races that after bad performances he would deliberately harm himself, once giving himself a black eye.
