Parallel Lines: Bradley Wiggins, Denial, and the Long Ride Out of Pain
I’ll start with a sincere apology.
After my blitzkrieg of articles while I was recovering from facial feminization surgery, you’ve had nothing from me for about twelve days, which must be a record. But here we go again. Let’s get back into rhythm.
The last few weeks have been relentless. I got back from Bangkok and went straight into moving house, which was… painful. Twenty years of life, peeled apart box by box, drawer by drawer. It’s hard to describe what it feels like to separate everything you once shared with someone, to stand there debating who owns the blue jug, or who gets custody of the Le Creuset. It’s a slow, bitty kind of heartbreak.
But we’re here now. A new house, a different light through the windows, and the faint sense that something’s beginning again.
I’m finally at the point where I can sit with a coffee in the morning and read the paper before I start work, a small luxury that used to be normal. And that’s where today begins.
Anyone who knows me well will know about my cycling obsession. For years, it wasn’t just a hobby, it was a full-blown identity. I still love cycling, though now it feels gentler, more human, less like a compulsion. But it’s still there in me, the rhythm, the hum of tyres on tarmac, the quiet satisfaction of motion.
And so this morning, when I opened The Telegraph and saw Bradley Wiggins staring back at me, I stopped.
This morning in The Telegraph, I read a review of Bradley Wiggins’s new autobiography, The Chain, a raw, unfiltered thing, the polar opposite of the glossy version he wrote after his 2012 Tour de France and Olympic victories. The piece described a man peeling back his own mythology, layer by layer, until only the bruises were left.
It took me straight back to when I first encountered Wiggins in detail after his 2012 year, or rather, when I thought I did. It was the first autobiography, the golden one. I didn’t read it, I listened to it, through an earpiece, while cycling from London to Brighton and back again in a single day. Roughly 160 miles.
That was my thing back then: long, punishing rides. Legs burning, mind churning, numbers always ticking, cadence, power, distance. I was an absolute cycling psycho, just like him. I know what that’s like, that particular kind of obsession where every mile is a prayer and a punishment. The harder you push, the quieter your thoughts become.
And I think now that when Bradley wrote that first book, he was probably in equal denial about who he really was as I was that day, hammering the pedals through Sussex. He was still pretending to be the bloke the world needed him to be, the mod hero, the working-class champion with the sideburns and the swagger and I was doing much the same in my own way: a man in Lycra, hiding from himself in plain sight.
We were both trying to out-pedal shame.
When I look back, I can see that the obsessive streak, the cycling, the training, the endless self-improvement, wasn’t about fitness at all. It was about control. Containment. If I could keep the body busy enough, maybe the mind would stay quiet.
But of course, it doesn’t work like that. Sooner or later, something breaks.
For him, it was cocaine, scandal, grief, and the slow unravelling of his public image.
For me, it was ecstasy, sleeplessness, and the moment I smashed my face into a bathroom sink after tripping over my own boots at four in the morning, wearing a corset I’d sewn out of a Head sports bag.
That’s the truth of addiction and repression , it doesn’t care what form it takes. Some people snort it, some drink it, some chase it up a hill at 25 miles an hour. The method changes. The machinery underneath stays the same.
When Wiggins writes now about the loneliness of his childhood, about the terror of being small and undefended, I feel it like a punch. I remember that same ache, the sense that there was no one who could, or would, step in to protect you. And I know the darker confession that sometimes follows: that when your father dies, you feel relief. Relief that he can’t show up and humiliate you again.
I had that same moment. And it’s the most shameful kind of freedom there is.
It’s why I think so much about my own son. I don’t see him every day now, and that breaks my heart. When I think about him, I sometimes find myself fearing that, quietly somewhere inside, that same mix of love and embarrassment might exist. It’s a thought that haunts me, the echo of what was, repeating in some invisible way.
That’s the line that runs through everything, generation to generation, father to son, shame to shame.
Bradley’s book describes his life as a series of masks. So does mine.
The difference is that his were cheered by crowds, while mine were worn in the dark.
He writes about a coach who both abused and inspired him, the unbearable confusion of being shaped by someone who also hurt you. And I understand that, too, how trauma and ambition become twisted around each other until you can’t tell which one’s driving you anymore.
My own story was less famous, less televised, but the same hunger was there. I wanted to disappear into performance, to be good enough, fast enough, clever enough, anything enough that nobody would see the mess underneath.
When I think about those years, the raves, the speed, the ecstasy, the sleepless days, the dressing, the shame, it feels like I was conducting a slow, private autopsy on myself. Trying to find the thing inside that was rotting, and never quite brave enough to name it.
He had his “Wiggo” mask. I had mine.
What I admire about Wiggins now, reading these new extracts, is not the confession itself but the tone. the lack of self-pity. There’s no “poor me,” no attempt to dress the pain up as noble. It’s just a man finally describing his own chaos as it was.
And I get that. Because when I finally began to tell my own story, the drugs, the shame, the transition, I didn’t want to be pitied either. I wanted to be understood.
Both of us, in our own ways, have lived lives that looked impressive from the outside and unbearable from within. Both of us tried to fix the inside by perfecting the outside. And both of us eventually realised that the real work begins only when you stop pretending.
I suppose that’s why I like him, even now, after all the controversy. Because underneath the medals and the mess, there’s something painfully human about Bradley Wiggins. A man who ran from himself for decades and finally ran out of road.
I know that road.
I’ve cycled it.
And, somehow, I made it home (to my new little house)