"I'm not flying ever again, my feet are staying on the floor": Gareth Thomas will return for DOI final, but not as a competitor

"I'm not flying ever again, my feet are staying on the floor": Gareth Thomas will return for DOI final, but not as a competitor

Gareth Thomas will return for the Dancing on Ice final this weekend after insisting that he has fully recovered from the bout of illness that forced him to withdraw from the show.

And although he will play no further competitive part on the programme, the 38-year-old said this morning that he was determined to take to the rink once again as part of a group performance.

The smiling former rugby player also joked that his feet ‘would be staying on the floor’ in the future after an ear imbalance and fear of heights left him feeling sick and dizzy during an ambitious routine.

“I'm OK now, I got all cleared yesterday,” he said on ITV's Daybreak.

“I’ve had pins in me, I’ve been like a pin cushion for the last few days get ting all tests and everything kind of cleared, because I just want to get back on the ice on Sunday.

"It all started on the ice for me, and I want it to end on the ice so I want to do it on Sunday.

“I'm going to be back on Sunday, yes. But I'm not flying ever again, my feet are staying on the floor.”

"They said it would get better, but for me it just got worse"

 

He added: “We’re not competing, I'm just back for the final. Everybody’s coming back.

“And again - I didn’t want to go through to the final unless I go through fairly. As a sportsman, I either go through fairly or I don’t go through at all.

“But I just want to be there because we’ve got all really, really close as a group, and I want to be there to support the three finalists and also to see everyone else again.”

The burly ex-CBB housemate also indicated that he had been struggling with dizzy spells for nearly a fortnight before he was taken ill.

“We started like two weeks ago practising for it and the first day I was like really ill after, really vomiting, really head spins," said Gareth .

“And every day I went up, and every day it got progressively worse and worse. They said it would get better, but for me it just got worse. And the worse thing happened i s we did a dress run prior to it and I'd got used to the studio, but then they had the studio lights, the pyrotechnics, and that was it, that was game over for me.

“My father has this thing, Meniere's, which is an imbalance in your ears, and it’s basically that. It’s basically the fact that I'm afraid of flying, I'm afraid of being up in the air, I was upside down, there was a lot of strain, I wasn’t breathing, I was really tense.

"It was basically a big fear and just an imbalance.”

* The Dancing on Ice finale is on Sunday, on ITV, with two shows at 6.15pm and 8.30pm