Grant Hacett Exclusive: “How Rehab Saved Me”

Grant Hackett learnt something valuable about himself in rehab — and it changed everything.

“I’m an intense perfectionist,” the three-time Olympic gold medalist tells WHO. “I can’t stand anything that’s not 100 per cent right. I would never allow myself to relax, always wanted intensity, always wanted to swim hard, go to the gym hard, run hard, do business hard. You have to offset it and I wasn’t offsetting it.”

After he appeared half nude in the lobby of the Crown Melbourne hotel and casino on Feb. 22 last year while looking for his lost son Jagger, Hackett checked himself into a US rehabilitation facility to treat his addiction to the sleeping pill Stilnox.

“It was the pressure of all that stuff over the years — emotional stress, missing the kids, financial stress,” says Hackett, who in 2011 went on an alcohol-fuelled rage inside his and wife Candice Alley’s Melbourne apartment (the pair later separated and divorced in 2013). “Sometimes you just have to hit rock bottom. It makes you realise where you want to go.”

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