Suicide, a sporting tragedy: Judo genius haunted by his Olympic pain

As June Fallon looks down at the two framed photographs on the fireplace of her son Craig, she briefly gathers herself before making an admission.

“Nobody knew Craig,” she says. “He never opened up to people. He was here, there and everywhere. Even I don’t understand him and he’s my son.”

It is now six months since British judo lost arguably its greatest ever exponent. Craig Fallon was 36 when he was found on the morning of July 15 near a campsite at the Wrekin, a Shropshire beauty spot between Telford and Shrewsbury.

Fallon had died by suicide and, as news of his passing reverberated across every continent of this truly global sport, the tributes multiplied for a fighter likened variously to Harry Houdini and a character from The Matrix.

Neil Adams, the only other British judoka simultaneously to hold world and European titles, said simply that Fallon was “a genius” and one of the greatest lightweights in history.

He was also a complete enigma.

Revered abroad and yet virtually unknown and unheralded in his own country; supremely motivated and obsessed by judo, and yet he might go three days when depression would make it impossible to speak or leave his bedroom; one of only three British men to become world judo champion and yet someone who regarded his career as  a failure; and he was an artist , both in judo and with a paintbrush in his hand, who was painfully shy and would not verbalise his struggles.

June says that Craig summed up how he felt about judo in a short video filmed shortly before he died last year and shown at his funeral.

“When I’m on the mat, and I’m fully engaged... it’s the one time I think I’m truly happy,” he said.

June is seated in the front room of her Wolverhampton home alongside Fitzroy Davies, Fallon’s long-time coach, friend and mentor. Most of Craig’s belongings are still upstairs. “We are six months on and I can’t touch my son’s stuff,” she says.

“I’ve not unpacked anything. I just can’t.” Davies then tells me about the last time he spoke with Fallon. It was only a few weeks before he died and, out of the blue, he had suggested paying for them to watch the Champions League final between Liverpool and Tottenham in Madrid. “I was, ‘Craig you ain’t got no money to spend’. I said ‘no’ and that was really the last proper conversation we had. There’s a lot I didn’t say. That’s the hard part.” 

June has previously turned down requests to speak about her son’s life but she now feels ready and there is plenty that she wants to say about mental health in sport, especially in this Olympic year. “There are a lot of people suffering,” she says. “A lot in the same boat. I want to make sure they talk and get the help. You have to listen and watch these people. Sport isn’t everything. You need something to back it up. These big governing bodies can’t get away with ruining people.”

Craig, says June, “was a dot” when he was young. His size meant he was bullied but he tried judo after a friend joined a local club. “It became Craig’s world. It meant everything to him. From eight... until what happened.” Davies, who ran the rival Hardy Spicer Club in Birmingham, never brought food to local judo tournaments and it soon became an unspoken routine that June would bring some spare meatloaf wrapped in tinfoil. This went on until Fallon was 15 and a change at Wolverhampton Judo Club left him looking for somewhere to train. “He was the man at Wolverhampton but my guys were older; they were crazy,” Davies says. “He had some wars.”

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Fallon’s progress was phenomenal. He was right-handed but learnt to fight even better left-handed to maximise the benefits of being unorthodox. He would dance on the mat like a judoka equivalent of Floyd Mayweather. 

He was also a winner and trained with a ferocity that Davies has never seen before or since. “He would be out running even on Christmas Day,” says June. The hurt at losing became evident when he was beaten in the national junior finals and Davies could not find him for six months. “Eventually I found him playing pool in a pub with his mate Leon. Gradually I persuaded him back.”

So what was he like as a young man?

“Quiet – he had to know you,” June says. “If he didn’t want to do something you couldn’t get him to. But if he was doing something, it was done just right.”

Davies nods. “I would think, ‘I knew you for two years and didn’t hear a sentence’ but now I can’t stop you talking. Once Craig let you in, you had a friend for life.”

Fallon became Commonwealth champion in 2002, aged 19. He then won the prestigious Paris Open in 2003. He became world champion in Cairo in 2005 when he was just 22 before adding the European Championship the following year. “We had some fantastic times,” June says.

Fallon remains Britain’s only male judo world champion this century but there was one title he naturally wanted above all others and which, with the arrival of National Lottery funding and UK Sport’s “no compromise” mantra, mattered above all others to British Judo. Fallon had the Olympic rings tattooed on an arm when he was 15 and his first tilt would come six years later in Athens in 2004. He seemed to be cruising when, with just four seconds of his last-16 tie remaining, he lost concentration and succumbed to a match-winning ippon. 

Davies can still vividly recall them seated together in the stands for two hours after the defeat. “Out. No aftercare. Nothing. We immediately said Beijing is the one.

“Four years. Prepare. And he did. He got everything near enough right and then the powers that be…” June completes the sentence, “... messed him up.”

Fallon was by this time already showing signs of mental health difficulties and sleeping was a major problem. “He could be awake at 3am or 4am and competing the next day,” Davies says. But nothing was spoken about and Davies readily admits he was ignorant then about mental health. June had previously supported her son’s passion by combining cleaning jobs with her early-morning shift at the Post Office.

Centralised funding would be a game-changer for many athletes but a double-edged sword for Fallon. “They have got the players depending on the Lottery money and can dictate,” Davies says. “It was controlling.”

Davies said that Fallon would be needlessly told to attend certain training camps and was effectively forced to compete in the 2008 European Championship, even though he had qualified for the Olympics by winning the previous year’s World Cup and wanted to focus exclusively that year on Beijing.

“What people don’t understand with mental health is that if you change something the balance is out,” June says. “It’s like someone with autism. You keep on to someone and you have lost them. Many times you could see the confusion.”

June says that Fallon was physically still at his “best peak ever” before the 2008 Olympics and was confident of at least a medal. He was fighting on the first day but fate would wreck his final preparations. The British Olympic Association had based the judo team in Macau but a hurricane struck and Davies, Fallon and training partner Gavin Davies were left waiting for two days to discover whether they would even make it to Beijing.

When they did arrive on the day before the competition, the Chinese taxi driver got lost and they had to walk the final three miles to the accreditation centre with all their luggage. They did not reach the village until 4am and Fallon still needed to lose 1.5kg. A defeat by Austria’s Ludwig Paischer – a double European champion but an opponent Fallon had beaten the previous five times – ended his gold-medal hopes and he finally finished an exhausted seventh. After training for this moment since he was eight, the decisive fight lasted five minutes.

“Beijing tore him to bits,” June says. “He felt a failure and that haunted him.” Fallon would later even have the tattoo of the Olympic rings covered up.

He lost his funding and drifted away from judo before returning to win the national championships in the higher weight class of 66kgs. Davies wanted Fallon to fight for his place in the London Olympics at 60kgs but, following a period training in Camberley in 2011, he sent a message to June simply saying that he loved her.

It sounded alarm bells. “Tina and Al [Fallon’s sister and brother] drove down to Camberley and fetched Craig,” Davies says. “He was drained and battered. He said to me, ‘I’m retired. I’m done’. He wouldn’t tell anybody why. And once he made up his mind about something, that was it.”

June says that “the demons” really started from 2008 and Davies snorts when I ask what support there was following Beijing. Or, indeed, once he had retired and was transitioning from life as an elite athlete. “You’re joking?” he says. “These players give their soul to judo and then all of a sudden, boom, next man in. You hear it from the athletes in other sports. What is the next pathway? It used to be about the medal in sport. Now it is about the funding first.”

British Judo said that Fallon received medical support during his career, as well as specialist care during the troubled stages of his life, but that lessons had been learnt and much had changed in the 12 years since Beijing as mental health issues became less stigmatised.

Britain’s only other two male world champions: Adams and Graeme Randall, were made MBEs following their triumphs but there would be no accolades for Fallon.

It was also noticeable that in the years he became World and European champion in one of the biggest participation sports on the planet, there was no place on a BBC Sports Personality of the Year shortlist that included eventual winner Zara Phillips, Andy Murray for reaching the fourth round of Wimbledon and Jenson Button for finishing sixth in the Formula One driver’s championship.

June repeatedly says that Fallon was “thrown to the kerb”.  Fallon would coach wherever possible and visit schools or deliver “masterclasses” across the continent where he was idolised. “He had to scrimp and save to make ends meet,” Davies says. The birth of a son brought new purpose. Senior coaching jobs in Austria and then with the Welsh Judo Association followed but what June calls “a black hole” became ever deeper. He sought help for depression in 2017. “He didn’t want people to know, even those close to him,” June says. “When Craig got depressed he couldn’t get out of bed. He couldn’t move. As the years went by, it was getting harder and harder. That big, black hole took him. He was too far in.”

The tragic facts of what happened on Sunday, July 14 2019, were presented at Fallon’s inquest in November. Shropshire coroner John Ellery reported that Fallon had “mental health issues including depression and personal relationship issues which set the background for what may have happened”. 

Fallon had dropped his six-year-old son off earlier in the day and sent a series of messages to his partner, Rebecca Dunning, of which the last was at 6.05pm. His car was found at the Wrekin where Rebecca and Fallon’s brother Alex had been looking for around three hours before calling the police. The failing light meant that the search had to be abandoned until sunrise and his body was then found shortly after 5am the following morning. Fallon had sent a letter to Rebecca, with whom he had been living since 2012, in which he said “remember this was my choice”.

Fallon conveyed hope that others could be helped. “Whether it’s sport or something I’ve always had I don’t know,” he wrote. “But depression is very much a problem in sport. Maybe you can help, you’ve seen and lived with it for years and others need help.” June and Davies also tell me about one particular person Fallon advised by telling him to follow simple steps for well-being. “He’d say, ‘Go for a run, eat well, drink water, sleep and it will shape your mind’. It helped this person and he was really grateful,” says June. “I think his legacy would be to not suffer in silence, for help to be there and to help others. That’s why we are here.”

As June then gets up to straighten the photographs, she tells me about the necklace she always wears with the words “mum and son” inscribed on one side and “June and Craig” on the other.

She also shows me some of Fallon’s paintings. One is of a lion’s head and another depicts a woman in black. “When he died, letters came from around the world – Australia, Belgium, Russia, Austria, France – and were all about what a nice gentleman he was and how much time he always had to help children in judo,” she says. “It’s a tragedy, but the suffering stopped. His suffering stopped. I’m just going day by day. What happened will never go, but I’m hoping nobody else has to go through it. I want to get the awareness out.”

Davies also shows me a band on his wrist that was given to him by the Austrian club where Fallon coached and which says: “The legend will never die”.

As we drive back to the station, Davies says that he thinks about Fallon constantly but that this should be the last time he talks publicly about him. Davies is the sort of volunteer who sustains sport in this country and, when I ask if he is still teaching judo, he gets excited about one of the members of the University of Wolverhampton’s team. That coaching buzz remains, even if there is then a pause before he adds: “But I know that there will never be another like Craig.”