Bradley Wiggins has said his departure from Team Sky on bad terms was his own fault, adding he has only recently properly resolved his difficulties with Chris Froome.
He also said he never came to terms with witnessing his school headmaster - Dubliner Phillip Lawrence - being murdered outside St George's Roman Catholic School, Maida Vale, in December 1995.
Wiggins was aged 15 years at the time and was a pupil at the school when Mr Lawrence was fatally stabbed as he went to the aid of a student being attacked by a gang. Wiggins believes that childhood trauma influenced him as an adult and fed into some of his negative behaviours after becoming very successful and famous.
“It probably stems from my childhood really. A lot of trauma I experienced in childhood, I witnessed a murder when I was 15. I never really accepted that. My head teacher got stabbed, Phillip Lawrence, outside of St George’s School - affected how I was as an adult.
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"My dad got murdered in 2008. It affected me into adulthood, when I had my own kids, I was never good at handling public fame and adulation."
Speaking on the Geraint Thomas Cycling Club podcast, Wiggins said the "fall-out" between himself and Froome was "really regrettable" and was largely down to "the way I behaved".
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"Me and Froome met up for the first time actually at the Tour this year, at a night club towards the end. We hugged it out," he said. "I speak to him a lot now, and it’s really liberating to go back and behave like you should have been behaving, really."
Wiggins added after he reached his peak in 2012, when he won the Tour de France and TT gold at the London Olympics, he handled fame badly and it impacted negatively on his relationships.
“Cycling is so consuming. It’s quite childish and petulant how I handled situations but that just stemmed from not knowing how to cope with things. It impacted on the relationships around me. I sort of left Sky on bad terms really, which I regretted because I was the maker of that myself.”
He added he "didn't appreciate" his success and took on a damaging persona in response to it.
"I ended up playing a character, I had this veil of playing a rock star. I think it was a good disguise to walk through life like that, and the fame and adulation, I couldn’t handle that as me. I wasn’t good at taking praise.
“I handled it a certain way and be quite shocking and contentious and sweary. I’d get drunk at things in order to perform and play the fool. That didn’t serve me well long term as it built up a perception of me - the impact it had on the kids, and keep up this image of Bradley Wiggins, really strong, Tour de France winner.
"Particularly towards the end of Sky, I was quite lonely. I used to just room on my own, wasn’t enjoying it, just ticking boxes. It was more for everyone else at that point, everything after 2012, I never really enjoyed anything after that again.”
