I’ve got my sparkle back – that’s what a younger man does for you! says Beverley Turner,

Beverley Turner can pinpoint the exact moment she realised her tumultuous 17-year marriage to Olympian James Cracknell was finally over.

He was packing up the car to drive off to Cambridge University to start an MA — head full of dreams of winning the Boat Race — while she dried up pots in the kitchen of their home in Chiswick, West London.

Another exciting new chapter was opening up for him as he chased yet another fresh challenge, while she — once again — was left at home to hold the fort with their three young children. ‘I was standing on the doorstep, waving goodbye and it felt a bit like your teenage son going off to university,’ says Beverley of that day in 2018.

‘There was an element of intense sadness, but I think I already knew there probably wasn’t any coming back from it or all the trauma that we’d been through.

‘I’d tried to talk to him multiple times about what it would mean to be away from the family so much, but he had his blinkers on.

‘When an Olympic gold medallist has something in their sights, nothing stands in their way. In his mind, I think he felt he didn’t have any option.

‘Throughout our marriage, for James, it had always been a case of “What next? What next?”. He’d felt a bit lost and this was another goal to aim for.

‘I don’t think either of us was ready to acknowledge at the time that this was the unofficial end, but the fact I didn’t put my foot down tells you where we were in the relationship.

‘If it had been great, he wouldn’t have been going. It was make or break, and it proved to be the latter.’

This is Beverley’s first interview since the couple announced they were divorcing last year. The decree absolute has yet to be granted.

Indeed, the Boat Race was the final straw for Beverley who had nursed James, 47, back to health after the horrific road accident ten years ago which left him with life-changing brain injuries.

Hit by the wing mirror of a truck as he cycled across America — on one of his many sporting challenges — her husband, doctors warned Beverley, would be on ‘Planet James’ for a while because of damage to the frontal lobe of his brain.

It was a devastating blow for the national hero who’d won gold twice rowing for Britain in the coxless fours — Sydney 2000 and Athens 2004 — and then gone on to row the Atlantic, and race to the South Pole.

Overnight, Beverley went from being a wife with a sparky, exciting, if exhausting, marriage to a sportsman in his prime, to something closer to a mother, as James struggled to recover.

The brain injuries caused him memory problems, difficulties controlling his emotions, issues with decision-making and exacerbated all the driven, almost selfish, single-minded traits required to become an Olympian. By his own admission, he became even more determined to prove himself a second time round, at the expense of his family life. At times, it felt to Beverley like she had another child to manage.

‘I had one husband for eight years and another husband for the next eight years. After the accident, he was not the man I married and it changed the whole dynamic.

‘I became much more maternal, which wasn’t healthy, and it brought out the worst in both of us. But I think we did a really good job of toughing it out for as long as we did,’ says Beverley, who was pregnant with their youngest daughter, Trixie, when James was injured. ‘Those first two or three years were truly terrible, with awful peaks and troughs, and it would have been so easy to leave James then, but I loved him enormously, our children were very young and I felt extremely sorry for him because the accident hadn’t been his fault.

‘The sad thing is we were in a really good place before the accident, and I consider it one of our greatest achievements that we managed to struggle on for another eight years. We both have a lot to be proud of, but the odds were always against us.

‘When I married James, I thought we’d be together for ever, but the divorce statistics for elite sports people is around 75 per cent, and higher again for marriages affected by brain injury, so put those two together, what chance did we have?’

Beverley, a TV and radio broadcaster who also runs a small business called The Happy Birth Club, providing ante-natal courses across three locations in West London, says she was not surprised when she heard ‘on the grapevine’ that James had been seen out dining with attractive young American blonde Jordan Connell, 34, now his partner, a few weeks into his first term at Cambridge.

She insists he did not cheat on her. Though they had not yet officially split up, they had long talked about going their separate ways.

‘I knew it would be inevitable because he was this handsome superstar in Cambridge. Our relationship had, effectively, been over for some time, and I was quite realistic that he was going to meet someone new,’ she says.

‘So I asked him, “I believe you are seeing someone?” and he just said, “Yes”. I replied, “OK, cool”, thinking “God, that was quick!” but then, actually, “Good for him.” There was this sense of “Thank God, he’s got someone to keep him company”.

‘James is not very good at being single. It sounds nuts when I say it, but I was genuinely pleased for him.’

Beverley says she’d even be delighted to see James happily remarried.

‘I met Jordan for the first time last year, just before James did Strictly, and we talked for two hours over coffee and I came away feeling as if a weight had been lifted,’ she says.

‘I didn’t realise until then just how much I still worried about him, and I felt I could now hand the baton over to this lovely woman who was smart, capable and competent. ‘He is now her responsibility and I feel I can let go. If there’s ever another call to say James is in A&E, I’d be happy for her to go.’

Beverley’s lack of bitterness over James’s new girlfriend is perhaps down to the fact that she, too, now has a new partner, eco property developer James Pritchett, who, at 32, is 14 years her junior. ‘I had such judgment about age-gap relationships before this,’ she says.

‘I would look at an older man with a younger woman and roll my eyes, but now I can completely see what they were doing. I cannot see any disadvantage to it. James P is 32 — a great age for a bloke!’ At 46, Beverley certainly looks as if she has her va va voom back, and then some.

Hair glossy and skin all youthful glow, the sparkle is most definitely back in those eyes. ‘That’s what having a 32-year-old boyfriend does for you,’ she laughs, though the actual words she uses are, well, a bit fruitier than that.

Say no more, but Beverley can’t help but list his other, seemingly endless qualities. 

‘He is full of empathy and kindness. He puts me first in a way that I am just not used to. He’s an amazing listener, thoughtful and generous with a lovely calmness.

‘He thinks I am wise and capable, which is lovely, and he is just the best company, whether we are sitting on the sofa, going for a walk or going out clubbing and getting drunk together.’

They were introduced through mutual acquaintances shortly after her husband left for Cambridge. ‘I needed some help with a property we own in Devon. I had a planning permission issue and was talking to friends who said they knew someone who could help and gave me a number of a guy named James.

‘I spoke to him and thought, “You don’t sound like the hairy builder I was expecting to talk to,” and he came round and there was this very handsome young man on the doorstep.

‘I didn’t for a second think he’d be interested in me, and it turned out he was absolutely useless on the planning issue, but he just started helping me with some stuff that needed doing round the house.

‘It was after Christmas that I realised he was interested in me and, believe me, as a 46-year-old mother of three that comes as quite a shock.

‘He spoke to my son Croyde and said, “I think I would like to take your mummy on a date. Would you mind?” And Croyde said, “Yes, that would be really nice. I didn’t think I’d want anybody to go out with Mummy, but as it’s you . . .”

The Cracknells’ children Croyde, 16, Kiki, ten, and Trixie, eight, are thriving and get on well with both new partners. ‘It’s all very grown up,’ she says.

So it came as a bit of a bombshell for Beverley to read the less than flattering interview James Cracknell gave to OK! magazine last week.

‘Bev was always viewing me through the prism of a brain injury and she stuck by how I was five or six years ago, rather than how I am now,’ he said of their break-up.

Of his new partner Jordan, a financier from New York, he added: ‘It’s nice to have a fresh start and to have someone with a totally fresh perspective.’

He even hinted that re-marriage might be on the cards in the future and possibly more children. ‘It depends how serious it gets. She might want to have children and it would be unfair for her not to,’ he said.

As for co-parenting with Beverley, he revealed there wasn’t enough room in the rented flat he shares with Jordan in Chelsea, so he ends up ‘babysitting’ at the old marital home in Chiswick, ‘which is not exactly what I had in mind at my age.’

Beverley sighs and shrugs. Theirs has always been one of those very rare celebrity marriages where both sides have been disarmingly honest about their struggles.

Last April, the day after James became the oldest rower ever to win the Boat Race, Beverley wrote about the disintegration of their marriage, describing how she would scream in the shower with despair so their children would not hear.

Of his latest feat, she dismissed as ‘b******s’ James’s stated desire to show his children ‘you can do anything you set your mind to’.

She countered: ‘I wouldn’t want my children to view such an exit from familial responsibilities as something to aspire to.’

So, Beverley accepts, she can hardly complain when her ex speaks as bluntly as she does.

‘It was typical James, candid and very honest but perhaps a bit tongue-in-cheek, and I’m fine with it,’ she says. ‘He acknowledged that I am a good mum and that the kids are lucky to have me, which is what matters most because they are central to my life and every decision I make.

‘I think the nature of brain injury is that it can be very hard for those who have been injured to see the changes in themselves, to have that insight, but it’s true to say that the James I was married to for the last eight years of our relationship was a very different man to the one I married, and that affected how I related to him.’

What stings most, however, is James’s suggestion that he has been reduced to a babysitting role. ‘He is a very busy man, so of course I have the children the majority of the time, but it’s been that way throughout our marriage, so nothing much has changed,’ she says.

‘The children love their dad and, of course, they want to see more of him and I suppose some people might find it unusual that he comes here to babysit, but it’s about putting the children first.

‘When he stays overnight, he’ll sleep in my bed, while I go to stay with my new partner James, or visit my mum or go to a friend’s house. I try to do that once a week or every two weeks, because when you are a single mum, you need a respite. I can cope with it, but it’s important to have those evenings to myself as well.

‘Of course, it would have been better to stay married, but we are where we are, and I am enjoying rediscovering the woman I was before marriage and children.

‘When I was younger, I had the skill set I needed in James C. He was ambitious — that’s very attractive — he was very successful, very focused, very driven and that’s a real aphrodisiac.

‘But, of course, those qualities that make you incredible as a sportsman, can make you very difficult to live with, especially when children come along.

‘If you are selfish by nature, which you have to be to win gold medals, that selfishness does not lend itself to being a particularly hands-on dad.

‘I don’t think James’s goals will ever evaporate. There will always be something else. Another marathon, another mountain to climb, another ocean to row. That makes for a very exciting life, but an exhausting one.’

Beverley will be appearing on The Daily Show on Mail Plus today.