Wiggins warns: Team Sky will ruin you

SIR BRADLEY WIGGINS has delivered a scathing assessment of Team Sky, warning a young rider to ‘steer clear’ of his former employers ‘because they’ll ruin you’. And the cyclist, who in 2012 became the first Briton to win the Tour de France when riding for Sky, also claimed that the controversy around the team is having a negative impact on the sport, not least at a time when Sky and their principal rider, Chris Froome, are still preparing their appeal to Froome’s failed drugs test at last year’s Vuelta a Espana. Clearly the relationship between Wiggins and Sky has been damaged by the fallout from UK Anti-Doping’s investigation into a medical package delivered for him at the end of a race in 2011. He accused UKAD of a ‘malicious witch-hunt’ last November when the agency said they had been unable to establish the contents of that Jiffy bag, and this week he said: ‘I am going to have my say on that very soon.’ As he announced the new roster and suppliers for Team Wiggins on Tuesday, the Under 23 team who race in his name, Wiggins was asked what advice he would give to rising star and new signing Tom Pidcock. ‘Don’t go to Sky in the future, steer clear of them,’ said the 37-yearold. ‘Go somewhere else, because they’ll ruin you.’ Asked to clarify the remarks later, Wiggins said: ‘They are not barbed jokes or digs, that’s the reality of the sport at the moment.’ Team Sky refused to comment on Wiggins’s outburst. MARK CAVENDISH abandoned the Tour of Abu Dhabi after injuring his shoulder in a crash soon after the start. The British sprint specialist fractured the same shoulder when he crashed into Slovakia’s Peter Sagan on stage four of last year’s Tour de France.