"At the team hotel, I threatened to walk" - Bradley Wiggins after being attacked by Chris Froome at 2012 Tour de France

Thirteen years after his historic Tour de France victory, Bradley Wiggins has opened up about the internal tensions that marked his time at Team Sky. In his new book The Chain, the 2012 Tour winner details how a single moment of insubordination from Froome nearly caused him to quit the race.

The conflict reached its peak during Stage 11 to La Toussuire, when Froome launched a brief solo attack despite his role as Wiggins’ key domestique, something that Wiggins did not appreciate at all.

“It was the last thing I ever expected to happen and it unsettled me massively,” Wiggins recalled in quotes gathered by The Sun. “Later, at the team hotel, I threatened to walk. My mind was clear. F**k it! I don’t need this! To win the Tour you need to be in control of as much as humanly possible. For a threat to come from your own flank is hugely disconcerting. If you can’t trust the guys in the same kit, who can you trust?”

Team principal Dave Brailsford and sporting director Sean Yates eventually convinced Wiggins to continue. However, the damage to his relationship with Froome was irreparable. “From that point on, I never felt able to trust Chris,” he admitted. “Like I say, riding on the front during those last few kilometres around Paris was partly to lessen my likelihood of crashing. But I was also determined that Chris shouldn’t benefit from any last-gasp hiccup and end up on top of the podium.”

Wiggins never returned to the Tour after 2012, as Froome went on to claim four titles in five years. After years of silence, he reached out to Froome in 2021.

“I told him straight, ‘Chris, I’m sorry.’ I wanted to settle it. The awkwardness had been going on for so long and it was paining me,” he said. “More than anything, Chris was a genuinely lovely guy, and I hurt him, and I shouldn’t have. To be able to speak to him again, to say sorry, was so liberating. It was unhealthy for me to carry that bitterness around. Being Chris’s friend again means an incredible amount.”

Wiggins also reflected on his strained relationship with Brailsford, whom he once described as a “big brother.” “There were times when I wouldn’t like Dave, wouldn’t trust him,” Wiggins admits. “In retrospect, the mistake I made was thinking the ties we had were unconditional. As we parted ways, I felt I was disposable to him. I felt I could be rinsed of all use and chucked in the bin with the rest of the rubbish.”

Wiggins compared Brailsford’s ruthlessness to that of Manchester United manager Sir Alex Ferguson, who was known for his uncompromising decisions on top players.

“After the success of 2012, Dave hosted Manchester United manager Alex Ferguson,” Wiggins recalls. “The velodrome was only down the road and Fergie was interested to see if there was anything he could take away and incorporate at Old Trafford.”

During that meeting, Brailsford sought advice from the football icon on how to maintain authority within a winning team.

“Dave told me later he’d asked Fergie the secret of his success. Fergie, he said, leant over. ‘The biggest thing in any organisation, any big sports team, is get rid of the c**ts’. Fergie was brutal when it came to people who challenged him. Dave seemed to be in awe of that bit of advice. I distinctly remember him repeating it to me: ‘Get rid of the c**ts!’”

Wiggins admitted that he later questioned whether Brailsford had applied that same ruthless mindset to his own case. “I couldn’t help but wonder whether there was an element of him doing that with me. Maybe he thought of me in the same way Fergie thought David Beckham had become bigger than Manchester United and Roy Keane had become too dominant as the captain. Like them, I felt I was basically driven out.”