Sports presenter Gabby Logan’s twins, Lois and Reuben, are the same age she was when tragedy rocked her family and left her unable to sleep.
Lois flew the nest last year, leaving her mum in tears. It’s been an emotional few years in the Logan household.
Gabby, who is appearing on The Great Celebrity Bake Off tonight (May 4), recently opened up about a setback the family unit suffered back in 2020, when her struggles with menopause, plus various other stressors, led her to have a meltdown and threaten to move out of the family home.
But at least her waning libido is no longer an issue. After revealing that the menopause had stopped her from wanting to have sex with her husband on an episode of Anna Richardson’s podcast It Can’t Just Be Me, she added that hormone replacement therapy (HRT) has improved things “massively”.
BBC presenter Gabby Logan’s brother Daniel died at the age of 15
Gabby Logan’s brother, Daniel Yorath, passed away at the age of 15.
He was having a kickabout with their dad, former Wales and Leeds footballer Terry Yorath, in their back garden. It was 1992, and Gabby, then 19, was on her gap year.
He had just signed for Leeds United, which had just won the old First Division. They were the “top team in the country”, the BBC quotes Gabby as saying.
“He was so fit, so strong, never ill, there were no signs at all,” she added. Daniel was just about to turn 16. “I couldn’t get my head around the idea that his heart had failed him.”
His death was sudden and, at the time, seemingly inexplicable. Terry assumed Daniel was messing about, Gabby said later. But after falling over in the garden, he “basically died on the spot”.
A postmortem examination revealed that he had a disease called hypertrophic cardiomyopathy. It makes the heart muscle abnormally thick, which makes it harder for it to pump blood around the body.
“I didn’t know young people could die that way,” Gabby told BBC Wales Live back in 2022. She has since campaigned for children to be screened for the disease as a matter of course, so that fewer families end up going through what she had suffered in the wake of Daniel’s death.
‘I was running from my grief’
Speaking on Georgie and Ben Ainslie’s podcast Performance People podcast in March of this year, Gabby explained that the tragedy led her world to collapse around her.
“I was running from my grief, probably, and then by the end of my first year at university, so just around the time of his first anniversary, I had some first year exams and it all kind of came crashing down,” she said.
“I’d stopped sleeping properly. I felt very wobbly, I just kind of lost my balance and I went to see a doctor and he gave me some sleeping tablets and I thought, that’s not what I need.
“Even I knew that’s not the answer to what was going on, it was much deeper than that, it was the plaster and my dad had had a lot of problems with sleeping tablets. He said: ‘Don’t take those, that’s not a good route.'”
Eventually, she tried counselling. The incident was “like a sledgehammer”, she said. And, being the eldest of four children, she took it upon herself to do as much as she could for the other members of the family.
Read more: Gabby Logan in grovelling apology after mistakenly telling viewers star’s family had tragically died
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