Shadows of the Sky years
Wiggins’ new autobiography, The Chain, revisits both the glory and the turmoil of his professional career — from Tour and Olympic triumph to public scrutiny over his relationship with the now-INEOS Grenadiers, then-Team Sky.
The team, led by Sir
Dave Brailsford, came under fire for its use of the corticosteroid triamcinolone, administered under TUEs in the seasons leading up to Wiggins’ 2012 Tour de France victory. A UK parliamentary inquiry later concluded that Sky had “crossed an ethical line” in their interpretation of medical exemptions, though no formal
doping violation was ever proven.
In The Chain, Wiggins maintains his innocence but accuses the team of abandoning him when the scandal broke. “Team Sky chucked me under a bus,”
he told The Times ahead of the book’s release. “There was something greater going on.” His comments to Radio 4 now extend that theme — implying there are still hidden details yet to surface.
Wiggins became the first Brit to ever win the Tour de France in 2012
“I had to see it through”
The 45-year-old admits the fallout from those years compounded the personal trauma that had long defined his private life. “It opened a wave of press articles, particularly from the Daily Mail, and in some of them the insinuation was I was lying,” he told the BBC. “But from that moment on, I felt like I had to see it through and make sense of it all.”
While much of The Chain deals with Wiggins’ childhood abuse, family trauma and eventual descent into cocaine addiction, the cycling world has been drawn to his renewed willingness to address the darker corners of his sporting past. His suggestion that others within the Sky setup were shielded from scrutiny echoes remarks made last week, when he told The Times: “It’ll come out.”
From scandal to recovery
Since retiring in 2016, Wiggins has faced bankruptcy, addiction, and a long battle with his own public image — the flamboyant “Wiggo” persona masking what he now describes as years of pain and disconnection. “I’m responsible for my own life,” he said. “I should have taken more responsibility for my own care and not been dependent on anyone else.”
Now more than a year clean and living with a strict daily routine, he says writing The Chain was a form of accountability. “Why write it now? It was a chance, a year into being a better version of myself and cleaning my act up, to get all this down in my own words, my own story, in detail.”
For cycling fans, however, it is his continued teasing of deeper revelations around Team Sky — and his promise that “the truth will come out” — that ensures the story of Britain’s most successful road era remains as complex, contested, and compelling as ever.