Having said last year he was "groomed" by a coach within the cycling world, Bradley Wiggins has now spoken at length about his ordeal, saying he was sexually abused within the sport between the ages of 13 and 16 years.
The 2012 Tour de France winner said he feared speaking about his ordeal when he raced for fear his rivals would consider him "weak". Instead, he "swept it under the carpet". However, when he became a father himself he said that gave him a clearer perspective about what he had been subjected to.
He said the coping strategies he developed early in life to deal with what had happened “contributed to why I was so great at cycling”. He "became aware that onlookers at the time, other coaches had recognised the signs and heard the rumours but did nothing about it", urging people to take a "common sense" approach to spotting those signs and coming forward with their concerns.
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Wiggins (42) was speaking at the launch of the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NSPCC) campaign which seeks to foster greater awareness around sexual abuse in sport and to encourage those who spot the warning signs to raise the alarm.
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“I kind of think it contributed to why I was so great at cycling. It’s a real contradiction in that the adversity is what gave me the drive to run away," he said according to The Guardian. “I think there’s a difference between being good and great at something and my greatest ability was riding on my own.
“The drive that came within, particularly with cycling, it was a means to facilitate escaping from where I grew up. So I’d ride for hours away from Kilburn … the bike became a vehicle to run away from my childhood problems. The longer I could spend on my own time-trialling for an hour record or an Olympic time trial, in my own head was an escapism from the person I was.”
“When I stopped cycling, I didn’t have that and I had to accept who I was,” he said. “I think lots of people that are great at something have a drive that kind of stems from adversity … What we can do is change and accept it, learn to stop running away from it and help others.”
Last year Wiggins said in an interview with Men’s Health that he was groomed as a child, adding it had impacted him into adulthood and was something he tried to suppress. However, he did not discuss whether the grooming progressed to abuse.
“I was groomed by a coach when I was younger – I was about 13 – and I never fully accepted that… It all impacted me as an adult… I buried it,” he said at the time, again as part of his efforts to promote the new NSPCC campaign.
