Bradley Wiggins first publicly revealed he was sexually abused as a child almost by accident during an interview with Alastair Campell for Men’s Health in 2022.
Wiggins had no plans to speak about what his cycling coach, Stan Knight, did to him on training camps as a teenager. But when Campbell asked, “What else were you running from?” when Wiggins walked away from the Tour de France after winning the race in 2012, Wiggins replied: “A lot of stuff. I was groomed by a coach when I was younger – I was about 13 – and I never fully accepted that.”
Campbell clearly wasn’t prepared for the answer, saying: “Blimey, we’re getting it all today,” and the interview soon meandered to discussion on Eurosport commentary and Wiggins’ opinion of Boris Johnson.
“He didn’t press me for detail, but it was like a weight had come off my shoulders the minute I did that,” Wiggins told BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday. “It opened a wave of press articles, particularly from the Daily Mail, and in some of them the insinuation was I was lying – ‘what a bizarre statement to make, without adding any context to it’ – which I could probably see, there was some plausibility in that. But from that moment on, I felt like I had to see it through and make sense of it all.
“It wasn’t till about a year and a half on from that interview, I did another interview with The Sunday Times Magazine and that sparked other people to come forward who were also victims of this same gentleman, and that caused me to spiral even more because it was confirmation for me. I always thought I was the only one.”
Wiggins’ laid bare the abusive practices of Knight, who gave invasive massages, touched his victims in the shower under the guise of teaching good hygiene, and shared beds with the boys while staying away in hostels. Wiggins’ account encouraged four more men, all in their 40s, to come forward and reveal similar experiences while under Knight’s supervision.
Wiggins goes into more detail in his new book, The Chain, an account of how his troubled childhood dogged him throughout his career despite the outward success of Tour de France and Olympic glory. He writes about a hotel stay with Knight, who died in 2003, when Wiggins vomited during the night and woke up in the morning without his pyjamas. “I know somehow, be it through the food or another way, he drugged me,” he writes.
Wiggins’ book also details how he wrestled with the relationship with his father, Gary, a cyclist who left when Bradley was only 18 months old and did not make contact with his son for more than a decade. He recalls how his bullying stepfather cynically filled the void in his life. Wiggins tried to reconcile with his father in his 20s but discovered a man hooked on substance abuse, and he was later killed in 2008 after an assault.
He also opens up on the Jiffy-Bag scandal in which a mystery package was delivered to Team Sky during the 2011 Criterium du Dauphine. A parliamentary inquiry concluded the team “crossed an ethical line” in their exploitation of therapeutic-use exemptions (TUEs) which allowed riders to take the banned corticosteroid triamcinolone, which Wiggins used before major races at the height of his career. Wiggins claims Team Sky, led by Sir Dave Brailsford, “chucked me under a bus” during the fallout.
“I was put in a position where I had to prove a negative,” he told Radio 4. “The story that ran after that was full of innuendo, supposition, and it grew. It was a sinister act, there was a lot going on behind the scenes and continues to this day. One thing I will say on that, I think the truth will come out at some point. As time passes, and maybe very soon, the truth around that time will eventually come out.”
In his book, Wiggins attributes the hardest challenges of his life – “Stan, my dad, his murder, success, fame, the package, the witch-hunt” – for allowing himself to fall into a cocaine addiction which consumed his life after cycling. He admits snorting lines off his Olympic gold medal, and smashing up his Sports Personality of the Year award in front of his children.
Wiggins says he lived behind a mask of “Wiggo”, this extroverted character with sideburns and sunglasses who could do remarkable things on a bike, and who provided a blanket for the internal torment he felt.
But he holds himself accountable for how his life unravelled after cycling, telling Radio 4: “I’m responsible for my own life. So it’s not something that I sit looking to blame anyone. I’m 45 years of age, and the day I won the Tour de France I was 32 years of age, so I was a grown man. I think I should have taken more responsibility for my own care and looking after myself, and should not have been dependent on anyone else.”
He has been clean of cocaine for more than a year and added: “Why write it now? It was a chance, a year into being a better version of myself and cleaning my act up, to get all this down in my own words, my own story, in detail, something I didn’t do initially when I came forward with that allegation [of sexual abuse].”
