WIGGINS IN THE SPOTLIGHT
Did you cheat at any time? What was in the Jiffy bag? Did drugs help you win Tour?
SIR BRADLEY WIGGINS last night spoke for the first time about the damning allegations made about him in an explosive report into doping. Wiggins, who faced calls to be stripped of his knighthood yesterday, was questioned by the BBC on their flagship 6pm news bulletin. He insisted: ‘I don’t mind getting a flogging, if it’ll help me I’ll go back to Henry VIII times and stick my head in one of those things and get people to flog me but it’s the kids,’ he said. ‘People see what’s reported and they get a hammering at school and it’s disgusting. ‘These allegations, it’s the worst thing to be accused of, but it is also the hardest thing to prove you haven’t done.’
IT WAS an assured performance Sir Bradley Wiggins gave on the BBC last night: confident yet not entirely devoid of emotion, and with faltering moments which added a little humanity to an individual who has rarely departed from a tone of righteous indignation over the past few years.
‘This is a direct. . . this is... this is... someone trying to smear me,’ he declared at one stage during the interview he had finally been persuaded it would be wise to give. There were soundbites, too. ‘I would have had more rights if I’d murdered someone.’
This interview, aired on the early evening news, followed an episode of
Pointless. There was something terribly fitting about that, given its breathtaking lack of appreciation for the way that his and Team Sky’s dissembling and evasion have shredded the reputation of cycling and cyclists. Wiggins argued his corner, talked the talk, but did nothing to remove the miasma of suspicion and doubt which stalks his sport.
It always seems to be someone else’s fault with him. ‘The whole Jiffy bag thing was a shambles,’ he said of that mystery tery package destined for him him. ‘God knows (what was in it). Your guess is as good as mine.’ You wondered, when he said that, where on earth the self-awareness was. Wouldn’t you go to the end of the earth to discover the contents of a package if a misunderstanding about it was ruining your reputation?
He isn’t one for the small details, though. Wasn’t it a little too convenient that Team Sky doctor Richard Freeman lost Wiggins’ medical record because he couldn’t get to grips with Dropbox technology to share them? And then had the misfortune to take a laptop containing them to Greece and find it stolen?
Wiggins preferred to discuss the effect of this whole controversy on his children and his own search for personal contentment. ‘I’m trying to be in retirement and do other things in my life,’ he said.
No thought, then, for the real victims of this scandal: the young sprint cyclists who have invested their lives in following the dream to be like him.
Some have been signed up by Team Wiggins with the promise of being ‘the future champions of this sport’ — to quote the team’s website. They drive to races in continental Europe, sleep in their cars on ferries, eat at motorway services and earn maybe £10,000 £10 000 a year — £28,000 at best. They include racers like Ethan Hayter who, at 19, won gold for Great Britain last week in the team pursuit at the World Track Championships in Apeldoorn, and Jack Carlin, the Scot who won two silvers there.
Cycling is becoming so toxic and corroded that you have to imagine the money will have started running out by the time many of these young competitors reach their prime.
Skoda, one of the main sponsors of Team Wiggins, did not respond yesterday to our enquiries about whether support would continue. You only have to view the latest Skoda advert to appreciate why. It captures Sir Bradley walking the dogs, waving the kids off, at the school panto, jamming with one of his mates, to the soft strains of a ballad — as the man in question drives a Skoda.
‘I’ve spent my life doing everything possible to achieve the best times I could,’ Wiggins says, a line as deeply ironic now as the pay- off. ‘ Skoda — driven by something different.’
He will tell you that he can’t help that. ‘I can’t control what people are going to think,’ he told the BBC, adamant to the last that everyone else has it wrong.