A kick in the teeth for all of us who cheered him on
THOSE of us fortunate enough to have been there will never forget those glorious ten days in the summer of 2012. It was when a lad from Kilburn, with self-deprecating humour, mutton-chop sideburns and a penchant for Mod clothes, took his place alongside the likes of Sir Bobby Charlton and Sir Roger Bannister in the British sporting pantheon.
On July 22 that year, cyclist Bradley Wiggins stood in the shadow of the Arc de Triomphe, a Union flag draped round his neck, after becoming the first Briton to win the gruelling 2,200-mile Tour de France.
By August 1, he reclined on a golden throne at Hampton Court Palace, having somehow recovered to power 27 miles around the Surrey lanes and take gold in the time-trial at the London Olympics, beating his nearest rival by 40 seconds. He became the first person to win the Tour and Olympic gold in the same year.
As reporters reached for superlatives, words such as ‘superhuman’ and ‘freakish’ were inevitably bandied about.
Not in a derogatory way, of course. For no one then dreamed that anything other than hard graft and God-given talent had propelled ‘Wiggo’ to those two famous victories. He was honest, through and through.
After all, this was the man who had bravely spearheaded the crusade to clean up cycling, a sport tainted by decades of doping scandals, and who led the oh-so virtuous Team Sky, with its repeated promises to ‘win clean’.
The man who, in his 2012 autobiography, underlined his moral and ethical opposition to drug abuse thus: ‘If I doped I would potentially stand to lose everything. It’s a long list.
‘My reputation, my livelihood, my marriage, my family, my house. Everything I have achieved.’ That a Comtains mons committee has now decided Wiggins prepared for that all-conquering summer by using a ‘powerful corticosteroid’ to boost his all- important power-to-weight ratio not only shames Wiggins, but lays him open to charges of hypocrisy.
The accusation – which the cyclist vehemently denies – is a kick in the teeth for the millions who took him to our hearts, voting him as BBC Sports Personality of the year in 2012, and applauding his knighthood the following year. Indeed, since cycling has brought Britain enormous success in recent years, enhancing our international status, it is a tragedy with ramifications far beyond sport.
The irony is that Wiggins’ story was so inspirational – and there is no doubt his physical courage on the track and in the moun- has been phenomenal. His father, Gary, was a tough Australian cyclist who met his mother, school secretary Linda, while racing in London.
They moved to Belgium, where Wiggins was born in 1980, but within two years Wiggins Snr – who drank heavily, beat his wife, and made money by selling amphetamines and speed – had booted them out of the house and found another woman. (He died in 2008, apparently after being involved in a brawl.)
Bradley then lived in North London with his nan and grandfather, George, a sports fanatic who became his mentor when he began cycle racing aged 12. Wiggins was a teenage prodigy, starring on the junior circuit (where he met his wife, Cath, the mother of his two children) but slid almost off the rails in his 20s, when he also began drinking heavily. After several seasons of road racing, he returned to the track in 2008, and won two golds at the Beijing Olympics. In 2010, he was poached by the new Team Sky outfit under British Cycling supremo Sir David Brailsford (who is also heavily criticised in the report). Eyebrows were raised when Brailsford pledged to win the Tour de France for Britain within five years – and do it without recourse to cheating – not least because team leader Wiggins had come a lowly 24th in that year’s race. However, he achieved his pledge with three years to spare. Inevitably, given cycling’s reputation, Wiggins’ massively improved performance gave rise to suspicions, particularly among the envious French press.
But he dismissed their questions with trademark tart ripostes and preserved his reputation as ‘Le Gentleman’: the chivalrous racer who gave thirsty rivals bottles of water, and waited for a rider whose tyre had been burst by tin-tacks scattered by a vandal.
Today his knight-of-the-road image – which has made him the face of Skoda’s TV ads – looks increasingly hollow. The slogan for the car maker’s moody commercial is ‘driven by something different’. Given the damning findings in today’s Commons report, we might think this grimly appropriate.