Sir Bradley Wiggins’ descent is the most sorrowful I have encountered in sport

Revelations about legendary British cyclist’s financial woes dash hopes that his road to perdition could end at happier destination

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There was a moment of unbearable pathos when Sir Bradley Wiggins sat down in Colorado this summer to dissect his torment with, of all people, Lance Armstrong. “‘You’re a legend, you’re a hero’ – I get told that every day,” Wiggins reflected. “But take that away, and what have I got to offer anyone?” The question felt especially piercing because he could not seem to contrive an adequate answer. What began as a warm conversation morphed instead into a tortured therapy session, with each change of subject peeling back a fresh layer of turmoil in the figure who once sprawled across a golden throne at but who has since become debt-ridden and desolate.
“I’m on the right track now,” Wiggins assured Armstrong. “I’m truly out the other side.” You wanted to trust him, to cling to an idea that his road to perdition – a 12-year spiral from knighthood to bankruptcy – could yet reach a happier destination. But the latest revelations challenge such faith, with the claims against his estate doubling to almost £2 million, raising the prospect that he could be forced to sell the trademark to his own name. As a postscript to the Wiggomania of 2012, when he became Britain’s first Tour de France champion and a time trial winner at his home Olympics a fortnight later, it could scarcely be more pitiful.
Here is a figure who attracted more public votes as BBC Personality of the Year than any athlete on record, with over 492,000, and who magnified his brand of Mod chic at the ceremony in a double-breasted navy velvet suit. Now he is described as borderline destitute, a man with no fixed address who has been reduced to sleeping on friends’ sofas. When the sofa-surfing angle was put to him by Armstrong, Wiggins dismissed it as crude tabloid sensationalism. The trouble with this version of events is that the story came not from journalists, but from his own lawyer.
Wiggins’s descent might be the most sorrowful I have encountered in sport, purely because the purgatory is all-enveloping. Each time he claims to have turned a corner, fresh horror materialises. Last year he described how the birth of his daughter, Ava, had saved his life. And yet in the same interview he disclosed that he had left his partner and baby girl for six weeks, isolating at a hotel while severing all contact with the outside world. This year he has insisted to Armstrong that he is reformed and reawakened – only for it to become clear three months later that his financial struggles are more acute than ever.
There should be no judgment here. The weights he has shouldered, from a father who abandoned him to a stepfather who bullied him to a coach who sexually abused him, have been soul-destroying by any standard. Indeed, the cumulative scar tissue is so thick that you wonder how Wiggins can navigate a way out. The problem, essentially, is that his ordeal deviates from preconceived notions of sporting greats wrestling with their true identity post-stardom.
There are myriad examples of those who succumb to the pernicious influence of alcoholism or gambling once they retire. Except Wiggins’s tale is not one of addiction. On the outside, he looks in admirable physical condition for 44 – healthier, in many ways, than at his peak on the bike, when his concave cheeks and protruding ribcage hinted at his extremes of self-denial. But this facade belies an inner tumult that he has barely begun to resolve. In one exchange in 2022, he was asked how many close friends he had. “Probably none,” he said. “I’ve been focusing on getting myself back.”
The temptation is to trace Wiggins’s battle for self-worth to 2016, the year of his retirement, and to suggest that he has merely been seeking to fill the emptiness that professional cycling has left behind. It would be a flawed thesis, because it hardly scratches the surface of his search for meaning. On his return earlier this year to Herne Hill Velodrome, where his love of the sport first took root, he needed little invitation to expand on far darker chapters. “I never felt loved in childhood,” he said. “I was walking a tightrope at times. I think I was putting myself in some situations where someone would have found me dead in the morning.”
While you could read such remarks as an unmistakeable cry for help, Wiggins says that he has never spoken to a trained psychotherapist and that he has no intention of starting. The burdens he carries are oppressive, from the heartbreak of his formative years to the cloud that has hovered over his achievements ever since he was revealed to have received therapeutic use exemptions for a banned corticosteroid before three of his most significant races. He has been at pains of late to construct an alternative narrative, to maintain that the worst is behind him. But then you learn of the seven-figure debt mountain, and your belief in this carefully-curated image falters, replaced by incredulity at how one of British sport’s defining lives could have taken such a terrible turn.
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