Bored of life without gold medals, tortured by his past, now claims of bankruptcy
How did petulant Wiggins fall so spectacularly from his golden bike?
THERE’S an untold tale about Bradley Wiggins and a wall that goes back to a time before his reputation planted into one. It is from a period before Fancy Bears, Jiffy Bags and parliamentary hearings and a long while before his finances nosedived deep into the red — a period when everything he touched turned to yellow or gold.
The story traces to late 2012 and, according to multiple sources, the incident occurred at the Sky Sports headquarters in Isleworth, west London, not far from where he grew up.
A precise date is unknown but it was in the afterglow of a summer in which Wiggins won the Tour de France and then the time trial at the London Olympics just 10 days later. He was brilliant, enigmatic and without precedent among cyclists in Britain; the rebel king on his golden throne. He could also be spiky, petulant and obnoxious and that day at Sky he showcased the latter.
It’s worth knowing at this stage that the broadcaster has a tradition of asking high-profile guests to sign a white wall in the hospitality green room. When Wiggins accepted the pen it got messy.
What he wrote would lead one senior member of staff to summarise their visitor as ‘a total p **** ’ and it also necessitated the hasty cleaning of that wall.
The reason: he signed as ‘Jimmy Savile’. From a man who would later reveal the appalling sexual abuse he suffered in his own adolescence, it was as confusing as it was tasteless. For those who know him, several of whom contributed to this report, it was just another episode in the mystery of one of the most complex figures in the history of British sport.
In the wake of recent disclosures that a company controlled by Wiggins is facing possible bankruptcy, with debts close to £1million, they paint a picture of a recordbreaking athlete and a lost soul.
They talk of a child mired in hard circumstances and a man who beat everyone on wheels but never outran his traumas. Of a serial champion who lives under the weight of questions about doping and a retired sportsman with little idea of what to do next.
There are some whose view of Wiggins is as complicated as the man himself. Jonathan Vaughters, a spurned former boss and a major player in cycling to this day, says: ‘Some of the polish has come off for him and I think it is a bit tragic. But I really like Brad.’
Over the years others have offered a far less nuanced take, as contained in a yarn told to Mail Sport about a prominent rider with whom Wiggins once shared a team. He used a memorable password for his emails: “wiggo isaw **** r.”
It seems fair to suggest the ongoing riddle of Bradley Wiggins is a little like his career — it doesn’t have many equals.
WIGGINS was shooting from the hip a couple of weeks ago. It was at the Quad Theatre on Plymouth Marjon University’s campus and around 200 or so had paid £35 and upwards to be there.
It was only a small speaking tour, built on a handful of gigs in moderately-sized halls in November, and it will have plugged some gaps in his time and finances as he ponders this post-glory phase of life.
Since he retired from racing in 2016, shortly after the fifth of his Olympic gold medals and in the midst of an almighty scandal surrounding his name, Wiggins has drifted on a rough sea. He is divorced from his wife of 16 years, run and folded an expensive cycling team, abandoned plans to be a rower, dabbled in reality TV, left a role in commentary, and spoken about pursuing careers in social work, medicine and boxing.
The last of those appears to be one plan with which he is persevering. ‘I broke my finger recently but he came off worse,’ he told his audience, and with it came a claim that he had been offered a place on the ‘Misfits’ undercard for the Tommy Fury-KSI fight last October.
‘I didn’t have the balls to do it,’ Wiggins added. ‘But having watched the fight, I would have smashed the bloke.’
Time will tell if Wiggins stays with boxing for this is a man who is notorious in his circles for growing bored quickly. An anecdote told to Mail Sport this week detailed how a trip to a radio station once descended into farce when he stopped engaging with his interviewers.
After he left the studio they saw the notepad on his desk had been filled with a vast array of penis drawings. Attention can be a fickle thing with Wiggins, but he can still hold a crowd when the mood takes him. By all accounts, those gathered in Plymouth enjoyed his recollection of driving Mark Cavendish into a rage by hiding his £300,000 watch, and applauded when he announced that he will become a grandad at 43, courtesy of his son Ben, a junior world champion cyclist at 18.
That was some of the lighter material and his fans loved it — he has always had a powerful magnetism. That aura of an outlier, the mod with a chippy irreverence and a blazing saddle. It is why he was so popular when the going was good.
Team GB staff who worked at London 2012 still talk in fairly balanced measures about a guy who had a twinkle in the eye that could offset the infuriating swings of his character. He apparently only agreed to fulfil his media duties at those Games when he was bribed with McDonald’s and a stash of beers. It was all part of the charm before the storms.
But there was always a darkness within Wiggins, too. The stuff of a troubled soul.
Retrospectively, and in acknowledgement of whatever assistance he may have had from corticosteroids, there persists a sense of amazement that Wiggins was able to race so effectively while towing the anchors of his past — his dad abandoned him at two, replaced by a stepfather who Wiggins said could be violent. Then, in 2008, it emerged his biological father, an alcoholic ex-cyclist, had died traumatically at 55 (Gary Wiggins was murdered, according to Bradley) and last year Wiggins revealed that between the ages of 13 and 16 he was sexually assaulted by a coach.
Those are monstrously large bags
to carry and the Wiggins of today draws his own lines between cause and effect. He told his audience in Plymouth that the sexual abuse was ‘one of the reasons I became who I was as a cyclist and one of the reasons I behaved like I did.’ He has previously said elite sport was his ‘escape’, that his pain drove him to pedal harder.
With the escape route closed, it has become a sad, recurring question of how he is coping in the void of the sporting afterlife.
Naturally, the latest discussions around his financial affairs will only fuel the perceptions of a fallen star who reportedly earned £13m in the good times. The source of these current headlines was an update on November 7 to the public records at Companies House for Wiggins Rights Limited — liquidators say they have yet to be paid £979,953 they claimed after Wiggins entered an Individual Voluntary Arrangement in 2020.
A spokesman for Wiggins has previously said this does not affect his personal solvency, but it is an awfully difficult look. He chose to bring it up at the Quad Theatre.
‘There was a story that apparently I’m in £1million of debt,’ Wiggins said. ‘I wasn’t sat there like f ****** Alan Sugar saying, “I’ve got these companies doing all this”. Other people were doing it. My name got lumbered on it. Trust me there is a different story.
‘The hour record (which he broke in 2015) was the only cycling event that did pay-per-view like boxing. Sky put it on and sold 1.2million pay-per-views that day and I’m the one who’s in f ****** debt.’
They were punchy words from a punchy individual. An individual who ‘really wasn’t suited to fame,’ and was ‘too stubborn and could act like a child when he didn’t like certain advice’, according to one ex-colleague. An individual whose most successful periods are shrouded in bad memories.
In that regard, Wiggins doesn’t seem to care much now for Dave Brailsford, his former principal at Team Sky, under whom he won the 2012 Tour and eight Olympic medals. That being the same Brailsford who will soon be guiding Manchester United once Jim Ratcliffe buys into the club. On the stage, Wiggins would describe Brailsford as a ‘c***’ whose system homed in on his ‘biggest pain’ — the absence of a father figure — and used it to puppeteer an insecure lad to greatness.
There is a sense of torture in those comments, just as there was in his suggestion that many historic cases of sexual abuse, like his own, were ‘covered up’ by cycling’s authorities. On that front, one source who spent considerable time with Wiggins described his voracious appetite for reading stories on the Savile case and the details of those who may have helped cover his tracks.
TAKEN collectively, it is possible to hold deep sympathy for Wiggins alongside the cynicism around other aspects of his career and personality. Alas, the balance will always be determined by how we view the events of 2016, when a leak by a group of Russian hackers changed everything in the conversations around Wiggins.
They detailed his use of therapeutic use exemptions for the banned corticosteroid triamcinolone before the 2011 and 2012 Tour de France races and the 2013 Giro d’Italia, cited by Wiggins and Team Sky as a treatment for allergies and respiratory problems.
By the close of 2016, that had broadened into the unresolved mystery of what was in a Jiffy Bag delivered to Team Sky’s bus during June, 2011 at the prestigious Criterium du Dauphine, which Wiggins won.
Following the lengthy anti-doping investigations that accompanied those hurricanes, the successes of British cycling, the image of Brailsford and the legacy of Wiggins would never look the same again.
In 2018, the UK Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee published their findings into those therapeutic use exemptions. They landed with the force of an axe: ‘We believe that this powerful corticosteroid was being used to prepare Bradley Wiggins, and possibly other riders supporting him, for the Tour de France... this does not constitute a violation of the WADA (World Anti-Doping Agency) code, but it does cross the ethical line that David Brailsford says he himself drew for Team Sky... we believe that drugs were being used by Team Sky, within the WADA rules, to enhance the performance of riders, and not just to treat medical need.’
At various stages this has been called a ‘witch hunt’ by Wiggins, who denied all wrongdoing. As did his team.
Today, Wiggins carries the tone of a man trapped in a reputational limbo. On the Jiffy bag saga, he told his fans in Plymouth: ‘I brush off all the s*** that goes in the press.’ Be that as it may, it is far easier to side with the view expressed in 2017 by Damian Collins, the UK MP who chaired that Select Committee: ‘A cloud now hangs over one of our greatest Olympians.’
THERE are those who want to speak for Wiggins. They include Vaughters, an American former team-mate of Lance Armstrong and a past drugs cheat who became one of the most evangelical anti-doping voices in cycling. These days he is the long-standing CEO of EF Education-Easy Team, a sizeable outfit on the professional scene.
He has seen all sides of the Wiggins conundrum, which takes in the bitter time in 2009 when the Brit was poached from Vaughters’ Garmin operation by Team Sky. There are still embers of anger, but he can laugh now at one memory of Wiggins’ obduracy in forcing the move.
‘He quickly realised one way to trigger that exit would be to stop racing,’ he says. ‘A lot of people would probably just say, “I’m still on the team, I need to perform,” but Brad was smart enough to know if he made me angry enough, I might say, “f*** it”.
‘I remember the Eneco Tour in August 2009 — he rode the time trial and before the line he just pulled up and decided not to finish.
‘Another time, at Paris-Nice in 2009, we opened with a time trial and Brad finishes second to Alberto Contador. He’s upset by getting beat but also because this television helicopter blew a massive headwind into him. It was unfair, but he went home without telling anyone. We went to breakfast and he was just gone.
‘Brad is so intelligent. I think sometimes, because of that, the world is maybe a little boring for him. When it gets boring, he makes it a little bit more exciting for himself and sometimes that’s good, bad or destructive.
‘I don’t think he does things out of malice, but once he gets triggered, he almost doesn’t know any other way. That must come from his childhood, right?’
MAYBE some of that would also explain the writing on Sky’s wall. Or the penises in the notepad. Or the cues for a team-mate’s password. Or the countless other times when this falling star of British sport has acted up. Or maybe there is no answer to the riddle and those are just the easy parts.
Like everyone else in his sport, Vaughters has looked on as Wiggins’ legacy has shifted south.
‘He’s not held up on this pedestal in British society now,’ the American says. ‘I’ve been a very active anti-doping advocate and I don’t like the use of triamcinolone. But compared to the s*** I saw on US Postal Service (alongside Armstrong), that ain’t nothing.
‘In an odd sense, I think Brad might almost enjoy having to start from scratch. The fact that he hasn’t been able to be seen as this polished former hero has given him a new outlook on life and a new challenge. I’m hoping he finds his next passion soon.’
It’s an interesting view, even if the idea of proportionality around triamcinolone is a hard sell. Not necessarily for those who attended Wiggins’ talks and spent £175 on signed jerseys and £100 for autographed pictures — they didn’t let this unravelling tale get in the way.
It is notable, though, that none of the 200 guests in Plymouth hit the asking price of £500 for the Opus book of his career highlights.
Some things are evidently just too hard to buy into at this stage in what is a sad story.