As the Olympic Games come to a spectacular end, and I look back on two wonderful weeks of sport, during which Paris seemed to have taken the same happiness pill London that swallowed three Olympiads ago, a quick blog on one of the 2012 heroes, Sir Bradley Wiggins.
As one of those mad Brits who only likes the heat when out riding his bike under searing sunshine, I was just about to head out in the French heatwave this morning, when my son Rory messaged me. Attached was an interview with Wiggins he had just watched, which he said was really worth a look. It gave me an excuse to delay my ride to the Col de Madeleine for an hour or so. Rory also pointed out that during the interview, the multiple gold medal Olympian and Tour de France winner had mentioned me two thirds of the way through as having helped him open up about his mental health, and come to terms with the trauma of having been sexually groomed and abused in his childhood. My ego was sufficiently piqued by that to sit down and watch from start to finish.
It honestly is worth an hour of your time too. Here it is, a co-production between Original Penguin EU and CALM, The Campaign Against Living Miserably, which does so much great work in the field of suicide policy and suicide prevention.
Wiggins, who made millions from his sport but was recently in the news for having been declared bankrupt, has a lifetime of traumatic experience that could easily have buried him; a mother who never praised, hugged or said she loved him, and with whom he hasn't exchanged a word in recent years; a violent father, also a cyclist, who left them when Wiggins was a year old, coming back into their lives only when he heard his son was also something special on a bike; who was subsequently murdered, and Wiggins admits he never grieved; a coach who abused him sexually; a love-hate relationship with the sport; and a sense of not really knowing who or what he was, or who or what he was for. The Wiggo image that came to be so beloved of so many was an act, to cover over all of the stuff he was hiding, or running from.
He is very, very articulate, and even in the two and a half years since I interviewed him for Men's Health, I can see that he has gone ever deeper into himself - without therapy - and his analysis of his life past and present, sufficient to give a very good sense that, for all the problems he still faces, he is more at ease than he was when he was writing himself repeatedly into the cycling record books.
I confess to having become quite emotional on hearing him talk about our meeting. At the time I was writing a series called Talking Heads, for Men's Health Magazine, focused on mental health and well-being. But Wiggins admitted to CALM he had not intended or planned to talk about the sexual abuse he had suffered at the hands of a coach when we met. He had buried it away all his life, and there was plenty of other mental health related stuff he could talk about.
But he said it was the first interview he had done which wasn't really about cycling, and he knew about my own mental health struggles and advocacy. "Had it been anyone else I don't think I would have talked about it that day. It was the catalyst for me coming to where I am today. It was about feeling safe, believed and understood by someone who has also been through that journey."
He recalled, accurately, that afterwards he told me he worried about putting the sexual abuse story into the public domain, knowing that it would get picked up by the papers, as indeed subsequently it was, and that he wondered if I might not cut that bit from the interview. I said I felt it was unbelievably powerful, as brave as anything that had emerged from all the mental health interviews I had done, and it would help other people. So he agreed to keep it in. And then came the bit that pushed at the tear ducts. "It's funny, having his backing on that ... had I not done that interview maybe I wouldn't be here today, I don't know. I wasn't suicidal, not going to kill myself but putting myself in situations where someone would have found me dead in the morning. I wouldn't have done it on purpose, but I was walking a tightrope."
And then, in the new podcast interview, he goes on to say that if him telling his story helps someone else deal with issues in their life, that that is cathartic for him too, and therefore helpful. "Once I opened up about it once, I wanted to shout it from the rooftops. It was one of the best things I've ever done in my life." I think that is why we all do this mental health campaigning stuff. You never quite know if it is helping anyone, but you kind of feel it might be, and you regularly get nice messages from people saying it does. But when you hear someone like Wiggo suggesting that an exchange we had helped keep him on Planet Earth, it is hard not to be moved by that; and above all motivated to keep going with it all.
Here is the interview he and I did back in the spring of 2022.
And while we are on the mental health issue, with thanks to the many who commented at the weekend, here for those who may have missed it, is the eight year old obit to my brother Donald, the anniversary of whose death was the weekend, and who remains my main inspiration in campaigning for better attitudes, understanding and above all - heaven help us! - services. P.s, apologies for the lack of paragraphs. Not sure what has happened there!!
