Bradley Wiggins on childhood trauma, adversity, mental health and the negatives of 2012
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ByEurosport
Updated 05/09/2020 at 21:17 GMT
In the latest episode of his podcast Bradley Wiggins reflects on his journey from a council estate in Kilburn to becoming Olympic champion and Tour de France winner. Plus more.
Olympic Gold Medalist Bradley Wiggins
Image credit: Getty Images
For the latest episode of his podcast, Bradley Wiggins and Graham Willgoss found a pub to talk over a barnstorming Stage 7 of the Tour de France. However, focus soon turned to childhood trauma, mental health and the negatives of 2012 in an open and raw conversation.
The 40-year-old grew up in what he terms a “dysfunctional family” after his father, who was murdered in 2008, left their home when Wiggins was just 18 months old.
In fact witnessing murder was not unknown on the Kilburn council estate where the future Olympian grew up, which, he told Willgoss, led to a sense of shame by association, but it was perhaps that adversity that moulded the drive that saw him become a multi-Olympic champion and Tour de France winner.
“Without the adversity there is no progression,” began Wiggins on the latest episode of The Bradley Wiggins Show.
“Ease is the biggest threat to progression and that is true to any walk of life. Lots of people grow up with adversity - it is what makes you stronger, it is what life is about.
It was how my life mapped out and it gave me the drive to be where I am today.
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Four years later I am at the f****** Olympics'
Sport - any sport - inspired Wiggins, who went from watching Michael Johnson claim Olympic gold in 1996 to competing and winning in 2000 before returning home to the estate in which he grew up.
“I was always inspired by watching sports events,” said Wiggins.
“Whether that was the FA Cup on Saturday or the Barcelona Olympics, where [Chris] Boardman, Linford [Christie], or Sally Gunnell excelled or four years later watching Michael Johnson win that 200m, breaking the world record and beating Frankie Fredericks.”
It would only be four years later that Wiggins would return to Kilburn with an Olympic medal of his own, having won bronze in the team pursuit at the Sydney Olympics.
“Four years later I am at the f****** Olympics, winning a medal and going back to a council estate in Kilburn, walking back in there with an Olympic medal and the tracksuit,” said Wiggins.
It was so disproportionate to what people believed they could do growing up in that area.
Despite his Olympic prowess, Wiggins and his family were still afforded a degree of anonymity but success at the Tour in 2009 - a fourth place finish - would lay bare the cost of success, with insinuations becoming ingrained as normal.
The 2009 Tour was, Wiggins says, the best Tour he rode and probably the happiest time of his life but the scrutiny that followed left him in a dark place.
“My overriding memory of 2009 was that it was probably the best tour I rode. It was the most enjoyable time of my life, I was Olympic champion, but I wasn’t a news story.
I came fourth in the Tour and that would have done me.
"But inevitably and sadly what came with that fourth was: ‘how has he gone from the gruppetto to finishing fourth, what is he up to?’
“That was the first time I thought someone has just p*ssed over an achievement.
“It is like you can’t achieve anything in cycling in that era unless you are doing something. That was the first time I thought: ‘That’s s***!’ But you get used to living like that and it becomes ingrained.”
'I was just trying to get out of bed in the morning'
The questions were intensified by the renewed focus on cycling following Lance Armstrong’s 2013 admission that he had doped throughout his career, and it bore a heavy weight on Wiggins.
“Winning the Tour the year before Lance [Armstrong] went on Oprah [Winfrey in January 2013] [meant I] had to bear the brunt of that,” he added.
“As the Tour winner I had to have all the answers. I hadn’t a clue - I was just trying to get out of bed in the morning.
I was in a bad way then [at the January camp in 2013].
"I wouldn’t say I was depressed but it was a very low point in my life trying to deal with what had happened the months before and it just amplified it, and I had some horrific incidents that happened to me in those years at Sky."
It is not a sob story, but life was never the same again after 2012.
The podcast also visits Wout van Aert taking a thrilling second sprint victory, Peter Sagan going Green and Adam Yates hanging on to Yellow on a day crosswinds tore the peloton to pieces. There’s more admiration for Julian Alaphilippe the aggressor; and has the first week broken Ineos, or are they just warming up?
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