Bradley Wiggins, Tour De France winner, record-breaking Olympian and knight of the realm, is sat in an Austrian hotel bar trying to explain his latest career move. “I’m not a risk-taker,” he says. “I’m not a thrill-seeker either.” It’s a strange thing for a man who has spent the majority of his adult life pedalling at breakneck speed to suggest. Stranger still when you consider that, for his first post-retirement act, the champion cyclist will be flinging himself down a precipitous ski slalom route as part of a TV reality contest that has done for so many celebrities and athletes before him. Wiggins is entering The Jump, which is nothing if not risky.
Yes, The Jump is back … somehow. The celebrity winter sports show returned this week for a fourth series of gaudy lycra and flailing limbs, which seems utterly implausible when you consider its past performances. This is a series frequently described as cursed. A series the Sun reported as having been cancelled last year after ratings “fell off a cliff”. And a series that has maimed so many famous folk – one contestant, model Vogue Williams, has already exited this year’s competition due to injury – that you’d assume not even Z-listers would touch it with a ski pole.
You’d assume wrong. Wiggins’s involvement underlines The Jump’s peculiar paradox: the more injuries, the more impressive the list of people willing to risk life and limb becomes. Last year saw six contestants withdraw prematurely due to various breaks and sprains, with Olympic gymnast Beth Tweddle suffering a neck injury so severe that she underwent surgery to fuse together two vertebrae. Yet this year’s contest has assembled a murderer’s row of athletes to face off against Wiggins: Olympic gymnast and Strictly victor Louis Smith, English Rugby World Cup winner Jason Robinson, former Liverpool striker Robbie Fowler (AKA ‘God’), Olympic Taekwondo gold medallist Jade Jones, multi-discipline paralympian Kadeena Cox and Wales rugby legend Gareth Thomas.
Yet there’s no doubting this year’s star draw. The show doesn’t even attempt to pretend otherwise, positioning Wiggins a few inches ahead of everyone else in promotional pics and making sure to announce him “last and definitely not least” in the show introductions. The adulation even extends to his fellow celebs.
“I was in awe of him for the first week”, admits comedian Mark Dolan, a 33/1 outsider in this year’s competition. “I kept trying to sit next to him at lunch, but he’s like Tom Cruise: you’re not allowed to make eye contact without prior approval from his agent.” Not everyone is quite so starstruck: Josie Gibson, famous for winning one of the later Big Brothers, admits she had never heard of the Tour De France winner, while TOWIE’s Lydia Bright initially thought it was Christopher Biggins who would be donning the lycra.
Did Wiggins take much encouraging? “It took a while, because I had just retired and I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” he admits. “I think it helped seeing that Robbie, Jason, Gareth and Louis were doing it. Because straight away I was like, ‘yeah, OK, it’s not like going into Big Brother’.” (More cynical types might suggest that Wiggins is using The Jump to distract from the controversy swirling around him and his Team Sky at the moment.)
Learning a series of winter sports on the fly is certainly more challenging than the usual reality TV fare. But that might just be the appeal: one final opportunity for former elite athletes to prove themselves. Sure, it wouldn’t rank among their finest achievements – “I’d put the Cowbell trophy in the loft”, says Robinson, while Fowler jokes that he’s “looking forward to touring Liverpool on an open top bus” – but the sense of rivalry between the athletes seems genuine.
This competitiveness is particularly acute for those who have competed in the Olympics, says Louis Smith. “Everyone expects Olympians to be this special breed and be good at everything.
“I am shit-hot at skiing, though,” he adds.
Wiggins is especially enamoured with the toboggan. “It was very similar to racing on the track,” he says. “The g force, the racing on the banking, all that feeling of speed, the minimal control of the thing – I just loved it. I hated it at first because they just sent us down it with no information, but by the end I loved it. It’s just brilliant, that feeling at the end, that speed you’re going, it’s exhilarating.”
In the ante post betting odds, Wiggins is second favourite behind Smith, with Made in Chelsea’s Spencer Matthews a close third. But Wiggins doesn’t seem to be annoyed at not being favourite.
“To be honest, it’s just a bit of fun. I don’t envisage myself winning. I’m quite realistic; I know there are better jumpers than me. My worst fear was going home week one or week two and just looking like a complete prat but I think I’ll be alright. I’m racing Mark Dolan the first week so …”
Wiggins is right to be confident. In his ski slalom race in the opening episode, he beats Dolan by a couple of inches and avoids the dreaded jump-off. While it would be a stretch to suggest he looks a natural on the slopes, given that he’s only been skiing since the turn of the year, he does possess that infuriating mix of poise and intensity natural athletes tend to have. He looks a solid bet for The Jump’s coveted cowbell.
But then, as so many times before on this most savage of reality contests, disaster strikes. Just as he eases down after victory, Wiggins begins to limp heavily. It emerges that during the race he has torn a muscle in his leg. After just one round, his future in The Jump is in severe doubt (a Channel 4 statement says Wiggins “remains in the competition”). Whether he will soldier on or exit early like so many before him remains unclear. What is clear is that The Jump is a risky business.
