page_title: Bradley Wiggins
section_title: Other
hierarchical_section_title: Bradley Wiggins / Personal life / Other
caption_attribution_description: Bradley Wiggins at 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony
context_page_description: Sir Bradley Marc Wiggins, CBE is a British former professional road and track racing cyclist, who competed professionally between 2001 and 2016. Nicknamed "Wiggo", he began his cycling career on the track, but made the transition to road cycling and is one of the few cyclists in the modern era to gain significant elite level success in both those forms of professional cycling. In a career, notable for its breadth and diversity in terms of elite achievement, he won world titles in four disciplines, and Olympic gold in three. He is the only rider to have won both World and Olympic championships on both the track and the road, as well as winning the Tour de France, and holding the iconic track hour record. In addition, he has worn the leader's jersey in each of the three Grand Tours of cycling and held the world record in team pursuit on multiple occasions. He has won a gold medal at 4 successive Olympic Games from 2004 – 2016, and as of 2020 held the record as Great Britain's most decorated Olympian with 8 medals. He is the only rider to win the Tour de France and Olympic Gold in the same year, winning them a week apart in 2012.
context_section_description: Wiggins speaks fluent French through his participation with French cycling teams and after living in France for a number of years.
  In a period after the 2004 Olympics, Wiggins started to drink heavily as he struggled to cope with his newfound fame. He stopped when his son Ben was born. "We had a baby. So then it was a case of, 'well, I've got to earn some fucking money' and the responsibility takes over," he explained.
  At the 2012 Olympics, Wiggins rang the Olympic Bell to mark the start of the opening ceremony inside the Olympic Stadium.
  Wiggins has written a number of books about his career. The first, entitled In Pursuit of Glory, covers his success as a track cyclist at the Beijing Olympics, where he won two gold medals in the team pursuit and the individual pursuit. It also talks about his triumph at the 2009 Tour de France where he finished in fourth place. In My Time he talks about the setbacks he faced at the 2010 Tour de France. He also talks about the "golden year" of 2012, in which he won the Tour de France and then, just days later, the Olympic individual time trial gold medal in front of a British crowd at the London Olympics. (My Story is the junior edition of My Time.) His fourth book, My Hour, is an account of his attempt on the hour record in 2015, covering the record's history, his training, and the attempt itself.
  Wiggins' power output has been measured to be over 450 watts at anaerobic threshold.
  In March 2014 Wiggins made an appearance as himself in an episode of BBC Radio 4's soap opera The Archers as part of the Sport Relief charitable appeal. Two years later he appeared in a comedy sketch filmed at the London Olympic Velodrome with Michael Crawford on Sport Relief 2016 where Crawford reprised his Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em character Frank Spencer.
  A sculpture dedicated to and inspired by Wiggins was unveiled in 2014 at St Augustine's CE High School, his former school.
  On 5 January 2017 it was announced that Wiggins would be a contestant on the Channel 4 winter sports reality television programme The Jump. However he was forced to withdraw from the show during the second week when he fractured his leg during training.
  In June 2017 Wiggins revealed that he had taken up rowing on a serious basis after initially using it as a means to keep fit, with fellow Olympic champion James Cracknell as his coach. He stated that he was planning to compete in the British Indoor Rowing Championships in December of the same year with a view to competing at the 2020 Summer Olympics. He competed in the elite 2000m at the Championships, finishing 21st in a time of 6:22.5 after a slow start due to mistakenly believing that the race had false started.
  In 2018 Wiggins launched The Bradley Wiggins Show, a cycle racing podcast produced in association with Eurosport, for a series of four episodes covering that year's Tour de France. The series received over a million downloads, and the show was renewed for a 20-episode run the following year, featuring discussion of the spring classics, Grand Tours and Road World Championships. He also took up punditry work for the channel in 2019, providing studio-based analysis for the Giro d'Italia before acting as a motorbike-mounted reporter for the Tour de France.
caption: Wiggins rang the Olympic Bell to mark the start of the 2012 Summer Olympics opening ceremony
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