Bradley Wiggins has talked a lot recently about his troubled relationship with cycling and the bikes, other sports and childhood trauma. This last part may have propelled him into success in the sport but it has also seen him stop cycling completely after retiring. He recalls how his father's negative words fueled him to become better.
"One day he read in a magazine a 'B. Wiggins' in the results [when he was] in Australia, and he thought, 'that must be Bradley'. He wanted to be part of the success and make up for all those years," Wiggins said in the Imposter Syndrome podcast. He explains that his father had left when he was a baby and returned upon seeing his success as a youngster in cycling."...I eventually met him two years later, when I was 19, because he had no money, and he came over to Belgium to a race I was doing and I'll never forget it. I was 19."
Wiggins, who is a former Tour de France winner and Olympic Champion, became one of the most successful riders of the 2010's and retired in 2016. After letting go of the road, he still focused on his goals on the track, and his British background helped him make the transition away from racing as he became a regular figure in the TV broadcasts of the biggest races in the world. All of that may have been driven by a trauma that his dad left him when he was a teenager. "A lot of my cycling career was about running away from my past really," he admits. "It was a good distraction and a lot of it intrinsically linked around my father and the lack of a father figure as a child."
"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," he details. "From that day on, there was this drive for so long after that to be better than him."
