“It’ll come out…” – Bradley Wiggins claims Team Sky “chucked me under a bus” to protect someone else from doping allegations

Former Tour de France winner and Olympic champion Sir Bradley Wiggins has alleged that Team Sky sacrificed him to shield someone else from doping scrutiny during the height of their dominance.

Speaking to The Times ahead of the release of his new book The Chain, Wiggins reflected on the doping allegations that dogged the team during his Tour-winning years, saying, “There was something greater going on. [Sky] chucked me under a bus.”

Pressed on who or what was behind it, he hinted at deeper revelations to come: “It’ll come out,” he answered intriguingly.

The accusations stem from one of the most controversial periods in modern British cycling. During Wiggins’s career, the team faced scrutiny over their use of corticosteroid TUEs in 2011, 2012 and 2013, as well as the infamous Jiffy bag delivered at the 2011 Critérium du Dauphiné. Wiggins was granted TUEs ahead of his Tour victory in 2012 — something he has always maintained was within the rules.

Wiggins’s new book details not just the fallout of those years, but also his personal descent into addiction following his retirement in 2016.

He admits to snorting cocaine off his Olympic gold medal during the depths of his addiction: “Hundreds of thousands of people roaring me on, millions more watching at home. One of the great moments of London 2012, and there I am in a wardrobe, snorting cocaine [off my gold medal], mocking my achievement, hating it for what I believed it had brought me. It was the equivalent of pissing on someone’s grave, and in that moment, I was pissing on my own.”

The five-time Olympic champion writes of homelessness, nights spent in crack houses, and of how the glory of the Tour and London 2012 turned hollow in the years that followed.

Now a year clean, Wiggins is in recovery through Narcotics Anonymous and says the book is part of his “apology and accountability” process. Former Tour rival Lance Armstrong also played a role in helping him enter a rehabilitation programme in the United States. “I wanted to be the teller of my own story. Good and bad,” Wiggins told The Times.

The 45-year-old has cut out alcohol and rebuilt a strict daily routine — rising at 6:15am, training in the gym, planning his meals and, crucially, riding his bike again for the sheer joy of it. “Gym helps. I go every day. I live like I’m a professional athlete,” he said.

The book also addresses the long shadow of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of his former coach Stan Knight, which caused him to turn away from cycling after retirement. Knight died in 2003 without facing justice.

“I associated every aspect of [cycling] with Stan. If I hadn’t taken up cycling, I’d never have met that man,” Wiggins said. “I love going on my bike at the weekends. It’s phenomenal. That sense of escapism I had as a kid. Freedom. Yes.”

Having emerged from bankruptcy, Wiggins says he now has “more work than I can cope with” and a home of his own. But his remarks about Team Sky’s handling of doping allegations — and the suggestion that others may have been protected at his expense — will undoubtedly reignite debate about one of the sport’s most controversial eras.