“People ask me now, ‘Are you Bradley Wiggins?’ and I always say, ‘I used to be,’” the former cyclist explains with a painful little smile as his famous name slips from his mouth. “It’s funny because I do it to everyone in this book. When I met Miguel Induráin he got embarrassed. I don’t like it when people do it to me. I say, ‘I’ve moved on. He’s gone now, that person.’”
The book is called Icons. It’s rather beautiful and an intriguing blend of cycling history and personal snippets which offer insight into Wiggins’ contradictions. The “proper nerd” he used to be, as a cycling-obsessed teenager living on a London council estate, shines through some endearing pages about the bike riders who consumed him when he fell for a brutal and complicated sport.
Yet it is striking that a man steeped in cycling history should avoid acknowledging in the book that Icons features many dopers. Wiggins, instead, writes that “romance is the soul of cycling.” The romance, however, has been stripped by allegations and denials of cheating – and by open confessions of persistent doping.
Wiggins’ own story is tarnished. His life is nothing like it was in 2012, when he won the Tour de France and Olympic gold while being celebrated as a British icon who could do little wrong. In March 2018 a parliamentary culture, media and sport select committee published a devastating report which claimed Team Sky had abused the anti-doping system and allowed Wiggins to use triamcinolone before the 2012 Tour. The report concluded that Sky had “crossed an ethical line” in obtaining therapeutic use exemption forms to enable Wiggins to take triamcinolone which, apart from helping his asthma, enhanced his power-to-weight ratio. Sky and Wiggins reject the charge. The impasse has taken its toll with no one able to prove whether or not triamcinolone had been sent in Sky’s notorious Jiffy bag.
But, first, we discuss his book and the choice to mention doping only in passing. “It’s not a book about that,” Wiggins says. “There are greater people, with more powers, that can do something [about doping].”
As an ardent collector of cycling memorabilia, Wiggins estimates “I could make a phone call tomorrow and sell the whole collection for half a million.” But his love of cycling has been regenerated by the book, which features evocative items given to him by the chosen Icons. “Cycling means the world to me and I’ve gone back, no chains attached. No political correctness. I’m not with a team that’s agenda-led – or want me to be careful about mentioning Lance Armstrong. I say what I like. It’s good to go back to when I fell in love with cycling aged 13. Growing up in Kilburn I could have ended up somewhere very different. Some would say I’d have been better off being killed or in prison.”
Wiggins looks up. “I was a kid living in Kilburn in the early 1990s, with pictures of Belgian cyclists on my wall. There has probably never been a kid in Kilburn, before or since, who had a bedroom wall like that.”
Life has changed joltingly since he won the Tour. “My kids have suffered,” Wiggins says. “We had to move schools and then all the stuff broke with Lance in 2013 [when Armstrong finally admitted to doping] and the kids started getting it.”
Everything became worse two years ago when Fancy Bears hackers released documents showing Wiggins had been given permission to use triamcinolone, a banned corticosteroid, for medical reasons with the appropriate TUEs, before races in 2011, 2012 and 2013. “People have free rein to put their own facts in place. Kids read headlines and their parents say things about you. You end up saying to your kids: ‘Just tell them to fucking do one.’ They do and it’s your kids in trouble.
“Then the BBC show up on your doorstep and you can’t take your kids to school. You tell the BBC, ‘I can’t talk to you, because there’s an investigation.’ They just want to know about the packages. The whole thing becomes an uncontrolled trial by media. In any other court it would be thrown out because the media have skewed the facts.
“You watch your family suffer, and it’s terrible. It nearly killed my wife [Cath]. She ended up in rehab over it. I’m at home having to deal with it. Because she’s bi-polar she has this fear of shame, people watching her all the time. You couldn’t say that at the time because you’ve asked for it, because you’ve won the Tour de France. No, I didn’t ask for that actually. I only asked for a fair trial.”
These personal words about his family provide a salutary reminder to those who have been so vehement. An ordinary family has been scorched but there is also hope when I ask how Cath is today. “Really good now. She’s moving on.”
Wiggins’s anger is still palpable. “What I should have done,” he says, “is murder someone because then I’d have had proper rights. I’d have had more rights as a murderer. There’d have been no articles and I’d have had a fair trial. I’d have been cleared or found guilty. Not somewhere in the middle where you can’t find any evidence of wrongdoing.”
Has Wiggins accepted his name has been tainted? “Yeah. I understand that not everyone’s going to like you. I don’t like everyone. It’s made me be myself more and say what I think.”
Will the truth ever be established – especially as Wiggins said earlier this year that “very sinister” details surrounded the Jiffy-bag scandal and he would “love it to come out.” He nods. “There’s a lot more going on than I alluded to this summer. I can’t prove any of it yet. It might take five years and, in the interim, I’m carrying on with my life.”
‘I talk to Lance Armstrong fairly regularly’
I am a sucker for many of the book’s stories. Wiggins’s first chosen icon is Johan Museeuw, the Belgian who won both Paris-Roubaix and the Tour of Flanders on three separate occasions. Flanders was the first race Wiggins watched, live on Eurosport in 1993, when he was 13. Museeuw won and Brad was thrilled because, in those pre-internet days, he usually had to wait until Cycling Weekly arrived at his local newsagent on a Thursday to find out who had won Flanders the previous weekend.
In 1996 Wiggins and his brother were taken by their mum to see Museeuw race in Flanders. Wiggins was almost beside himself but, being 16, he was “too cool for school”. He forced his eight-year-old brother to approach the cyclists. “He was acting as a proxy for me because I didn’t want to come across as the smitten, star-struck teenager I was.”
At his final Tour of Flanders, in 2015, Wiggins stressed how much Museeuw had meant to him. They swapped messages on Instagram. Museeuw’s 15-year-old son was a Wiggins fan and the circle was complete. The only problem was that when they met, and Museeuw gave him his 1993 jersey, Wiggins felt like a tongue-tied teenager again while the middle-aged icon had a high-pitched voice which “seemed the opposite of the ferocious rider he’d once been.”
It’s a lovely story but Wiggins looks surprised when I ask him why he does not mention Museeuw’s confession in 2007 that he “did not play the game honestly” and, like most cyclists of his era, had used EPO. In a 2012 Cycling Weekly interview Museeuw said of doping: “We must break with the hypocrisy. The only way to come out of that murderous spiral is to break the silence that haunts us.”
Surely Wiggins could follow his boyhood hero and write honestly about cycling’s dark history? “I didn’t because I’ve gone back to when I was 13 and didn’t know about EPO. I took all that out, not because I condone it, but because I can’t change who inspired me. I was inspired by their feats on the bike and the memories of them coming into the velodrome at Roubaix regardless of whether they were on EPO. In hindsight, they probably were. But it was like, ‘Fuck me, this is what I want to do. I have to get out of Kilburn and live in Belgium.”
Armstrong’s doping has been documented so thoroughly I can’t feel outraged by his presence in Wiggins’ book. But Wiggins suggests that, “Henri Desgrange, the ‘father of the Tour’, envisaged a ‘perfect winner’… a super athlete who would not only defeat his opponents but whatever nature might throw at him … it explains why Tour winners tended to be masochistic, obsessive and, on occasion, borderline sociopathic.” Wiggins concludes that Armstrong was “precisely the sort of winner Desgrange had in mind 120 years ago.”
The Guardian Sport
