Inside Bradley Wiggins' tragic fall from Olympic cycling hero to functioning cocaine addict

Independent

13-05-2025

Le Gentleman is what the local press used to call Bradley Wiggins, back in the time when he was dominating the Tour de France. Fluent in French, always stylishly dressed, sparkling in interviews, the first Briton to win the world's greatest cycling race was embraced in the country like few others before or since. So beloved was the then stick-thin Englishman, he almost became one of their own.
'My God they loved him,' recalls Ned Boulting, the veteran cycling commentator. 'I remember him holding court at press conferences, turning them into a stand-up routine. On form, he was just the best interviewee. He was completely unfiltered, he would tell you exactly what he felt. And he could be so funny. A brilliant mimic, he would have everyone in stitches doing his impressions. That was on a good day. On a bad day, he could be cruel, bitter, really, really horrible.'
For Wiggins, sadly, the bad days became ever more frequent. When the race he once dominated begins its annual national circuit on 5 July, the 45-year old will not be at its heart. There will be no civic receptions, no waving from balconies, no heroic grandstanding for Le Gentleman. Declared bankrupt, his family home repossessed, his financial life and reputation is now in tatters.
'It is a total mess,' says his lawyer Alan Sellers. 'He's lost absolutely everything. His home, his home in Majorca, his savings and investments.'
Worse, the achievements he accumulated, feats no amount of money could ever buy, have been permanently shadowed by an all-embracing cloud of doping allegations. And now his spiral into a cycle of debt and addiction are to be captured in a candid autobiography, The Chain, which details his childhood trauma, rollercoaster career and subsequent addiction. Ahead of its publication later this year, Wiggins told The Observer: 'There were times my son thought I was going to be found dead in the morning. I was a functioning addict. People wouldn't realise. I was high most of the time for many years.'
These are not good times for the man who was knighted by the Queen as a shining example of sporting excellence. Much of the coverage of Wiggins's decline has centred on the finance, the debts, the bankruptcy. It seems incomprehensible that someone who, in 2013, was reckoned Britain's third highest-paid sportsman (after Andy Murray and Justin Rose), who accumulated more than £13m in his stellar cycling career, who once ran a grand tour team in his name, should have fallen to such a precipitous low.
But some who have watched him at close quarters throughout his career reckon the money is only a manifestation, not the cause of his ills. And the clues were always there. Even at his peak, when, at the London Games of 2012 he sat atop a throne in Hampton Court after winning an Olympic gold medal just a week after finishing first on the Tour, this was a man never comfortable with success, never relaxed with fame, someone never entirely at ease with himself.
'He was a sportsman who was defined so much by his sport that he really only ever knew himself through the sporting context,' says Boulting. 'And the fact is, when his career was over, he really didn't have a clue who he was.'
It is not that Wiggins has ever shied away from where he came from. It was a place of abuse, cruelty and pain. His father, Gary, an Australian professional cyclist, abandoned the family before he was two. The only use he ever had for his infant son was to smuggle amphetamines through customs in his nappy.
Father and son had absolutely no contact until Wiggins became a successful rider himself, when the old man made an approach. They met and Wiggins was so appalled by the bitter angry derelict opposite him, so fearful of what he might become, he walked out of the pub where they had come together. And he never saw him again. When, in 2008, Gary died after being beaten up in a street fight in New South Wales, Wiggins couldn't bring himself to go to the funeral.
Other male role models were few and far between in his life: he revealed in 2013 that he had been sexually abused by his coach when he was a teenage cyclist, something he could not tell his violent and dismissive stepfather, who consistently mocked his cycling abilities. Fuelled by self-loathing, he threw himself into his sport, pursuing the relentless training with a masochistic intensity.
'Nobody trained like him,' says the cycling journalist Tom Cary. 'He just had one thing in mind: winning.'
So extraordinary was his application, that he turned himself from an excellent track cyclist, who won golds at four successive Olympic Games, into a dominant rider on the Tour, a discipline requiring not just a different set of cycling skills, but a whole other physique.
'To win the Tour you have to be able to win in the mountains,' says Boulting. 'He just made himself do it. Nobody has ever put themselves through what he had to do to win the Tour. He completely rebuilt his body.'
With success came acclaim. But he never found the adulation easy. In one of his several autobiographies, he admits that as early as 2004, after becoming the first Briton in 40 years to win three medals at the same Olympics, he took to the bottle to cope with the ensuing attention. He credits his then wife Cath – and the arrival of his son Ben – with stopping him. What he did not want was to turn into his father.
'I had responsibilities,' he wrote in My Time, his autobiography. 'I had to grow up.'
The trouble was, the more he applied himself to his sport, the more he won and the more fame came his way. By 2012 and his Tour victory, he was the nation's favourite sportsman. The Sun gave away free stick-on Wiggo sideburns to celebrate his mod style, Paul Smith released a line of clothing designed with him, his sleek, aloof, ironic detachment was reckoned coolness personified. It was, he later admitted, all an act. Unsure how to behave in the public eye, he hid behind a persona.
'I'm an introverted, private person. I didn't know who 'me' was, so I adopted a kind of veil – a sort of rock-star veil. It wasn't really me … It was probably the unhappiest period of my life. Everything I did was about winning for other people, and the pressures that came with being the first British winner of the Tour. I really struggled with it,' he wrote in My Time.
It was a struggle, he later admitted that deeply affected his disposition. As those closest to him quickly came to recognise.
'Everyone's mood was determined by how Brad felt,' says someone who was on the Sky Team during those Tour years, who prefers to remain unnamed. 'If he was in a good mood, it was a good day for all of us. When he was down, Christ it was tough. That said, he could be incredibly generous. He regularly bought everyone on the team a designer watch when we won.'
But, whatever may have been going on in private, the public bought the image. And when he won gold in the Rio games in 2016 before announcing his retirement, he was celebrated as the greatest. Across the country, hundreds of young wannabe Wiggos took to their bikes.
'His legacy is huge,' says Boulting. 'There'll be several riders on the Tour, British lads riding for foreign teams, who only got into the sport because of him. He inspired the country to get on its bike.'
But then, in September 2016, came the first real damage to his credibility. A bunch of Russian computer hackers called Fancy Bear leaked his private medical records online. It was clear he was using a steroid called triamcinolone.
His insistence was it was to counter the effects of asthma, a so-called therapeutic use exemption (TUEs). But over the next couple of years, Wiggins and Team Sky were embroiled in a scandal about how much they had been pushing the rules, filled with tales of TUEs, jiffy bags, and dodgy medics.
Damian Collins MP, then chair of the Select Committee for Culture Media and Sport, recalls the findings of a parliamentary inquiry. 'We believed that drugs were being used by Team Sky, within the WADA rules, to enhance the performance of riders, and not just to treat medical need,' he says.
The very greyness of the ensuing scrutiny cast doubt over everything Wiggins had achieved.
'It basically put an asterisk against his record,' says Cary.
His relationship with Cath was broken by the strain of public scrutiny. They divorced, he moved out of the family home, the companies they had run together began to wither.
His personal circumstances had always been his grounding, their stability a contrast to his father's waywardness. Without them – and without cycling – he floundered. He could find no valid direction. He tried boxing, he said he was going to compete in the 2020 Olympics as a rower, he trained as a social worker, then as a doctor. Nothing ever came of anything. And he took his frustrations out on whoever came close.
'He was really appalling to me and to this day I don't know why,' says Boulting. 'But to be fair to him, we stayed in the same hotel when he was doing some punditry for the Tour in 2019 and he came over and apologised. We had a really good long chat and he admitted he could be really vicious for no reason. It was obviously a symptom of what was going on inside.'
Occasionally he would undertake an interview, when, with his characteristic frankness, he would reveal much. He talked of the abuse in his childhood, of his battles with depression, of how sporting success meant little to him (in one interview he said he kept all his medals in a carrier bag and had smashed up his BBC Sports Personality of the Year trophy). And every time he would insist he was happier than when he competed. 'I'm more comfortable in my own skin,' his usual phrase.
Significantly, his own skin had changed completely. In 2012, as he sat atop that throne, his arms were ink-free. A dozen years on, he is now covered in tattoos, including a replica of an album cover by The Prodigy on his left shoulder and an image of crucified Jesus on his back. Every inch of his body has been turned into a graphic novel.
Through it all, the money ebbed away. Though invariably generous, he was not noticeably reckless with his cash, living comfortably rather than ostentatiously in Lancashire. He blames poor advice for the issues.
His lawyer Alan Sellers says he never properly understood finance. Whatever the cause, earlier this year everything suddenly collapsed. Wiggins Rights Ltd, a shield company for his earnings, had been put into voluntary liquidation in 2020. In 2022, the IVA was wound up because he hadn't repaid £979,953, mainly to HMRC. Now has come bankruptcy and an apparent loss of all his assets.
And in the last few years he has faced a challenge as tough as any in his life. While not as physically demanding as the climb up Alpe d'Huez, he didn't only needsto recover financially, but he had to find direction, purpose, meaning.
'I know it's not the same,' says Boulting. 'But I watched him turn himself into a Tour winner, and that required the most extraordinary mental determination. If anyone has the capacity to make the necessary change and find a new direction it is Brad.'
And Boulting mentions the fact that Ben, Wiggins's son, is now a professional rider, one many reckon has the capacity to soon race in the Tour. Wiggins senior has tried to keep his distance from the boy's cycling, anxious not to pressurise. But the pair's relationship is warm, and Wiggins has been often spotted in the background when his son competes, performing a role he never experienced when he was competing: that of the proud father watching on.
"The Chain," is expected to be published in late 2025