Show notes
We re-visit one of the most emotional and gripping conversations we have ever recorded. Eight Olympic medals, five of them gold, and the first Briton ever to win the Tour de France. For one summer in 2012, Sir Bradley Wiggins was the most famous man in Britain — sideburns, gold medal, sat on a throne at Hampton Court. He couldn't bring himself to put the medal on.
Bradley takes us right back to the beginning: a council estate in Kilburn, a father who left when he was eighteen months old and came back only once his son was successful, and a coach who sexually abused him between the ages of thirteen and sixteen — something he didn't say out loud for thirty years. Then he traces, with total honesty, how that damage became the fuel that made him great, and how the same fuel nearly destroyed him when the racing stopped.
Moments that will stay with you:
- Why Bradley laid his Olympic gold medal on the sofa rather than put it round his neck
- Smashing his trophies off the mantelpiece, and throwing out his knighthood
- His father's line, a week after they finally met: "Don't forget, you'll never be as good as your old man was"
- Realising the voice screaming at him up every climb of the Tour was his stepfather's
- Lance Armstrong offering to pay for his treatment, and what Bradley said back
- The hotel room his son had to come and find him in
He's unflinching on what drove him: that greatness often grows out of a dark place, and that isn't something to romanticise. That you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your habits. That fulfilment carries you further than happiness ever will. And his hardest-won lesson — not everyone who helps you is your friend, and not everyone who hurts you is your enemy. The answer isn't to forget the past. It's to change your relationship with it.
Contains discussion of the sexual abuse of children and of addiction. Please listen with care.
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