Freddie Woodward says he was hooked on online pornography for 10 years, beginning in childhood and carrying the habit into his life as a 30-year-old from Sheffield. The former Team GB diver is now pushing for better education around porn addiction, not silence.
He said the habit reached the point where he sometimes watched online porn multiple times a day and, on one occasion, 10 times in a day. He also said: "I realised I had a problem when it came to homework and exams, like GCSEs and A Levels. Every time I sat down to revise, all I wanted to do was open those sites."
Sheffield, Rio and 2016
Woodward competed at the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio after building a diving career that also brought him a bronze medal at the Commonwealth Games and a Junior European silver medal. The scale of that athletic rise makes his disclosure harder to flatten into a simple cautionary tale; he was talking about addiction while describing a career that demanded routine, discipline and repetition.
He said he became hooked as a child and was regularly viewing what he described as hardcore sites by the age of 12. By then, he was already training 20 hours a week in the pool and gym at Ponds Forge Sports Centre, and he said the two strands of his life started pulling against each other rather than running side by side.
GCSEs and A Levels
Woodward said the problem showed up first in schoolwork. Revising for GCSEs and A Levels became a fight against the urge to open those sites, and he said he realised the pattern was taking over his attention long before he had the language to describe it.
He also described a second pattern that runs through the story: after a bad training session, porn became the thing he could turn to. "If I'd had a bad training session, it was always the thing I could turn to," he said, adding that it could give him "more of a thrill" even as he said it left him feeling "dirty". That contradiction is the core of the disclosure — not a victory lap, but a public account of how a habit can reward and shame at the same time.
Facebook and Instagram
Woodward said the behaviour did not stop at viewing. He began sharing nude videos and photographs of himself with strangers on Facebook and Instagram, part of the same escalation he says followed him through training, exams and daily life.
In June, the government said tech companies like Apple and Google must install software to prevent children from taking, sending or viewing sexually explicit images on their phones and other devices. Woodward is arguing for the other half of the response: better education that is "not \"shame-based, but honest and evidence-led\"" so people who recognise the same pattern can ask for help before it hardens into routine.
