Wiggins details abuse and drug addiction in new book

Bradley Wiggins first publicly revealed he was sexually abused as a child almost by accident during an interview with Alastair Campbell for Men's Health in 2022.

- LAWRENCE OSTLERE

Wiggins had no plans to speak about what his cycling coach, Stan Knight, did to him on training camps as a teenager. But when Campbell asked, “What else were you running from?” when Wiggins walked away from the Tour de France after winning the race in 2012, Wiggins replied: “A lot of stuff. I was groomed by a coach when I was younger - I was about 13 - and I never fully accepted that.”

Campbell clearly wasn’t prepared for the answer, saying: “Blimey, we’re getting it all today,” and the interview soon meandered to discussion on Eurosport commentary and Wiggins’ opinion of Boris Johnson.

“He didn’t press me for detail, but it was like a weight had come off my shoulders the minute I did that,” Wiggins told BBC Radio 4 yesterday. “It opened a wave of press articles, particularly from the Daily Mail, and in some of them the insinuation was I was lying - ‘what a bizarre statement to make, without adding any context to it’ - which I could probably see, there was some plausibility in that. But from that moment on, I felt like I had to see it through and make sense of it all.

“It wasn’t till about a year and a half on from that interview, I did another interview with