Currently on tour in the UK with An Evening With Bradley Wiggins, the 2012 Tour winner hasn't been holding back.
Bradley Wiggins has said he won’t change the circumstances of his life or his views to please the media.
Describing some as “arsewipes”, he said he knew more about cycling than the journalists who cover it.
Wiggins made his remarks during an appearance in Nottingham as part of An Evening With Bradley Wiggins.
The event is a commercial venture, with those in attendance paying in to see Wiggins interviewed on stage.
It has also doubled as a promotional tour for his new book 'Icons', which has just been published.
He said during the event that his art teacher laughed when he said he wanted to be an Olympic champion.
However, “she smoked 50 a day so she’ll be long dead by now,” Wiggins adds. He also insisted fame was never for him and he had never pursued it.
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“The minute I got called a celebrity, I had to get out and get back to the real world,” he said of all the public engagements after winning the Tour and Olympic TT in 2012.
“I thought about moving to Monaco but then I thought ‘fuck that’. I don’t want my kids growing up like idiots, wearing loafers,” he added.
“I want them to learn the simple things in life, like going down the shops when the milk runs out.”
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Curtains close on the Icons tour tonight ? pic.twitter.com/yHdkrFhzs2
— Brad Wiggins (@SirWiggo) November 19, 2018
Bradley Wiggins recently created controversy with the publication of his Icons book as it included Lance Armstrong as one of his 21 icons of cycling.
However, he has defended the American’s inclusion, despite his doping-related downfall, by saying the book was about the riders who had inspired him.
And, Wiggins has said, when he was a young teenager growing up in London and saw Armstrong won the Worlds in Oslo, he found it motivating.
In the wake of the media reaction to his comments, he said could not change how he felt while he was growing up just because of adverse media coverage.
“I don’t give a fuck about all them arsewipes; Cycling News, the Daily Mail. I will tell my story,” he explained of his attitude towards the coverage.
“They don’t listen to the context. (Armstrong) was an inspiration at a certain point in my life.
"I didn’t always like him – when he raced for US Postal Service, with the black socks, all the Americanism – but that performance (in 1993) still gives me goosebumps.
“I’m not going to change my story just to appease people like Ned Boulting," he said in reference to one British journalist.
"I know far more about the sport than he does and I’ll challenge him on it. He just needs to engage his brain every now and then.”
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