British cycling icon Bradley Wiggins has bravely lifted the lid on his abuse by a childhood cycling coach and his struggles with addiction.
The Tour de France winner and five-time Olympic champion enjoyed the highest of highs in his career and the lowest of lows in life.
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Wiggins is one of Britain’s most decorated sportsmenCredit: Getty
Wiggins remains one of Team GB‘s most decorated Olympians with eight medals, five of which saw him stand on the podium’s top step.
The 2012 Olympic Games were his signature moment, with his final hurrah coming at Rio 2016 in the team pursuit.
However, in the almost-decade since retiring, Wiggins has struggled with divorce, bankruptcy, doping allegations, and cocaine addiction.
His trauma stems back to his pre-cycling fame, having suffered sexual abuse by his first coach, while his father died in 2008.
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Wiggins joined talkSPORT live in the studio to discuss the highs and lows covered in his new autobiography, The Chain, out on Thursday.
“I was living a lie for many years,” he told Breakfast presenters Jeff Stelling and Ally McCoist on Tuesday morning.
“The person who stood up at [the 2012 BBC] Sports Personality and accepted the award with a late 70s dandy David Bowie suit on, mod rock and roll hairstyle, two nights after that, I was playing at the Hammersmith Apollo with Paul Weller – Jam songs [‘That’s Entertainment’] on stage.”
“I created this perception of myself because of my insecurity and my self-worth and the shame that was attached to me from the things that happened in childhood.”
In 2022, Wiggins first publicly disclosed that his cycling coach, Stan Knight, abused him on training camps when he was a teenager.
The 45-year-old admitted his troubled childhood dogged him throughout his career, regardless of the success he enjoyed on track.
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Wiggins became the first Brit to win the Tour de France in 2012, and won road race gold at the London Olympics just weeks laterBradley Wiggins opens up on sexual abuse by childhood cycling coach
In his new book, Wiggins revealed that a hotel stay with Knight, who died in 2003, saw him wake up in the morning without his pyjamas after vomiting during the night.
“I know somehow, be it through the food or another way, he drugged me,” he wrote.
Explaining how such experiences saw him live a lie, in his words, throughout his career, Wiggins told talkSPORT: “The more famous I got all the more celebrity I got from the more success I had.
“That amplified the extent the eccentricity of me and so I kind of latched on onto something that I perceived as cool to kind of get by because of what I felt about myself and then when I retired and then my drug use and things like that and I can’t say it was a coping mechanism or whatever it was that led me down that path into addiction.
“The self-hatred that followed, the shame came to the surface and and I was living a lie not only as a cyclist because of what I’d hidden from childhood; being sexually abused by a 72-year-old man for three years, my first coach.
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Wiggins has given a candid account of his highs and lowsCredit: Getty
“That emasculated me incredibly, and so after that, during my career, there’s no way I was ever gonna come out with that.
“Winning Olympic Games, winning the Tour de France and then I’d have to step off the bike and be Bradley.
“I, Bradley, wasn’t enough. So I created a sort of perception of myself, and I played a character and hid under this veil.”
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Wiggins, who previously labelled himself a functioning addict, revealed earlier this year that his son feared finding him dead.
He added to talkSPORT: “Within three years of retirement. I was a drug addict, and my problems got worse; I was drifting into bankruptcy.
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“I never found something that that that gave me the same amount of escapism.
“I wouldn’t say satisfaction, but escapism from my past and my demons, and so I had more time to think, more time to get up to mischief and kind of spiral.
“So it’s only now with hindsight that I look back on this as I’ve been working on myself and dealing with getting rid of the ego and getting rid of the veil and and also being Transparent about the things that have happened to me, and that’s been a great release of the shame I’ve lived with for so many years.”