Kurt Angle shared some of the most interesting details about his exhilarating career.

Angle, who is an Olympic Gold Medalist at the 1996 Summer Games in Atlanta, Georgia, suffered from addiction and twice broke his neck wrestling, shared his thoughts during an interview with Lilian Garcia.

“For me it was my injuries,” said Angle when asked why he spiraled into drug addiction. “It was my injuries and also being in a pretty bad marriage at the time. I didn’t want to feel anything. But breaking my neck again in WWE I started on pain killers. The first pill I took I loved it. I loved how it made me feel. It made me feel indestructible. The more I took, I kept getting injured. You know, Lilian. I broke my neck four times in two and a half years. I just got more and more depressed. It was like, why is this happening to me? I didn’t want to feel the pain anymore. I felt like my career was being taken away from me.”

“Don’t train,” related Angle of his doctor at the time, Joseph Maroon. “We’re going to go to the trials and whenever you’re ready to wrestle, we’ll shoot you up five minutes before your match with nova cane, and then you won’t feel your neck for about an hour. But afterward you’re going to be in excruciating pain. We’ll just do that every match. So I did that in trials and at the Olympics.”