Judith Gates, wife of retired footballer Bill Gates, has spoken about her campaign to prevent future footballers from suffering the same brain damage as her husband. Bill Gates was a youth defender for Middlesbrough and England and retired from the game at the age of 30 before the prevalence of professional football head injuries became widely known.
Judith Gates remembers that her husband first started experiencing symptoms in 2010, in his mid-60s, when he began to forget plans they had made. He received a diagnosis of amnesic mild cognitive impairment in 2014 and struggled to remember things he had done just two hours previously. Gates began to believe that it was the impact of heading a football repeatedly during his career that had caused his brain damage.
Bill Gates passed away in December 2019 and, before his death, urged his wife to take action to prevent the brain damage he had suffered from happening to others. Gates put her academic background to work and believes that heading balls can cause chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a brain degenerative disease.
She hopes that her stories of caring for Bill Gates will help to prevent others from experiencing the same devastation. Gates and her husband had an unconventional start to their relationship, falling pregnant at 16, before marrying in their teens. Despite this, they both went on to have successful careers, with Bill Gates opening a chain of sportswear shops and Judith Gates becoming an esteemed academic in education
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