Bradley Wiggins says he has no memory of some of the biggest moments in his career and that his success as a cyclist resulted from his "oddness" as a person and "haunting" words from his father, who has since been murdered.
While he was estranged from his father - Australian cyclist Gary Wiggins - for most of his life, he reunited with him as he began to enjoy success on the bike as a junior. Wiggins said meeting his father again was the hardest day of his life.
“He rang up my nan’s house. He wanted to be part of the success and make up for all those years, and then I eventually met him two years later, when I was 19,” Wiggins tells a new six-part BBC documentary series, on imposter syndrome, to be broadcast next week.
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“He had no money and he came over to Belgium to a race I was doing, and I’ll never forget it. It was probably the hardest day of my life, actually, meeting him. Within a week he said to me, ‘You’ll never be as good as your old man’. The sort of jealousy crept in. To this day I remember clearly where I was when he said it.
“I was in the centre of the track in Ghent in Belgium. I’d done quite a good performance on the track and everyone was cheering for me. I was racing against men and shining. And he couldn’t handle it. He couldn’t handle the attention on me.
“He said to me, ‘Just don’t forget, you’ll never be as good as your old man’. He squeezed my arm and came in quite close to me so no one else could hear.
“It was quite a haunting experience. From that day on there was this drive for so long after that to be better than him. That’s what spurred me on in 2012.”
Wiggins revealed some time ago he was groomed by a cycling coach when he was a child and also had a violent stepfather. He has also spoken of trying to resolve childhood issues he had - which also stemmed from seeing his teacher, who was Irish, being murdered outside his school in London - after he stopped cycling.
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He says now that he has changed so much as a person, he has completely moved away from cycling and could never achieve the kind of success he did during his career being the person he is now.
“I don’t ride a bike anymore because I don’t like the person I became when I was on it," he said. “I can’t imagine achieving anything like that now in a sports perspective because I’m not the same person I was.
"I’ve grown now. I have all the answers. That all stems from my sporting career and greatness stems from an oddness about me which wasn’t resolved from childhood.
“I was the most confident bike rider when I was on it. But step off the bike and I had to step back as Bradley Wiggins, because the bike was where I was most comfortable and gave me all my confidence in my life.”
He added when he finished races, especially when he had just won big events, he felt he had to perform for the cameras and "be funny".
“I have no memory of standing on the Champs-Élysées or on any Olympic podium. The only memory I have of it is watching it back on TV," he said of the biggest moment of his career at the end of the 2012 Tour de France and the five Olympic Games where he won a total of eight medals, including five golds.
“When we were at my last Olympics in Rio (in 2016), the TV camera came on me during the national anthem and I could see myself on the big screen, so I pulled my tongue out. I would do that quite a lot in those important moments, really. I was so self-conscious of being looked at.
“The minute I stepped off that rostrum I was back as myself and I didn’t have the veil, the cycling, the bike.
“I had to be me, the person, and suddenly I felt, like, on my own. Which is why I then started growing the sideburns, the hair longer. Put funny suits on. It was all a distraction from actually being me.”
