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Race Across The World victor Alfie Watts has opened up about his relationship with his family and said he no longer speaks to them.
The 23-year-old stormed to victory on the globe-trotting BBC show in 2024, competing alongside his friend Owen Wood on a route that spanned 15,000 kilometres from Japan to Indonesia.
During his stint on the show, the football referee movingly spoke to Wood about losing his mother to breast cancer. He was also seen releasing a lantern in Vietnam in her honour.
He did not know his father until he was a teenager, so was predominantly raised by his grandmother in St Albans, Hertfordshire.
In a new podcast appearance, Watts has spoken about how his differing approach to grief caused a rift between him and his family.
Appearing on Matt Willis’s On The Mend podcast, he said: ‘Me and my family have never got on. Basically, I cannot resonate with a giving-up attitude. It’s not in me and they gave up. That really annoyed me, even from an early age.’
He continued: ‘At that point, they just decided that there was nothing left to live for, even though they had so many years to turn things around and make something for themselves.
‘There was never any passion to go out and see anything, any kind of hobbies, any urge to go and see friends.
‘Any time I did something, it was almost like I felt guilty for it because I should be feeling this level of grief they were experiencing.’
He went on to say that gap got ‘worse and worse’ as he grew older and more successful, adding: ‘It’s completely boiled over in the past year. As a three, we now just don’t talk to each other.’
Watts went on to say that he has had to discover a found family outside his bloodline, with close friends and a form tutor at school who became a pivotal male role model for him.
After being crowned the victors of Race Across The World 2024, Watts told Metro how his friends factored in his plans for spending his winnings.
He revealed he ‘had a great summer’ with the winnings, telling us: ‘I took all of my friends away.
‘The whole thing was I was gonna do Race Across The World, then I was going to have a period after where I went travelling again, and then I was going to settle down and become an air traffic controller.’
But life took a different turn, as he instead became a social media influencer, adding: ‘It hasn’t quite gone as I’d imagined back then. There is a part of me now that actually wishes I’d been a bit more responsible with the money. But you adapt to what’s in front of you.’
Race Across The World airs on BBC One.