Revealed: What really happened to Sir Bradley Wiggins
03 December 2024 7:01am GMT
The more that comes to light about Sir Bradley Wiggins’s sad descent into bankruptcy, the more people are asking where it all went wrong for the face of Britain’s greatest sporting summer.
News that claims against Wiggins’s estate have doubled to almost £2 million did little to allay fears for a man who seemed to have the Midas touch only to lose “absolutely everything” and be forced into alleged “sofa surfing”. This from someone who sat on a throne after winning the Tour de France and Olympic gold in 2012 before proclaiming: “It’s never, ever going to get any better than that.”
The tale of how the 44-year-old amassed and lost an estimated £13 million fortune can be traced back almost two decades to the launch of the image-rights firm he now blames for his downfall. Wiggins had yet to win the first of his Olympic titles when he, his soon-to-be-wife Catherine, and his mother Linda, set up Wiggins Rights Limited on June 28, 2004.
Image rights companies have long been utilised by those in the public eye as they are often taxed at a lower rate than applies to most income. But, by the end of its first year, which included Wiggins claiming the Olympic individual pursuit title, shareholders’s funds held by Wiggins Rights totalled just £4,176. The company went on to report a loss on an almost annual basis as Wiggins struggled to translate his cycling success into pounds and pence.
That was until he won double gold at the Beijing Games, after which he signed with leading sports marketing agency MTC and joined road-racing team Garmin-Slipstream in 2009 on a reported wage of £350,000 annually.
This, and his move to Team Sky the following year on what is said to have been a £3 million salary, coincided with Wiggins Rights banking hundreds of thousands of pounds. He also signed a six-year clothing deal with fashion brand Fred Perry shortly before his Tour de France triumph, crowning glory at London 2012, coronation as BBC Sports Personality of the Year, and subsequent knighthood, upon which shareholder funds in Wiggins Rights surged into the millions.
Yet, it was also after becoming the first man to win the Tour de France and Olympic gold in the same year that the first cracks emerged in the Wiggins empire. He sacked MTC in 2013 amid a bitter dispute over a bill for a percentage of his earnings, of almost £750,000, that sparked a lawsuit and countersuit that were ultimately resolved with an out-of-court settlement.
He also ran into trouble over a charitable foundation he set up shortly after London 2012, when he was forced to cover tens of thousands of pounds of losses out of his own pocket and the Charity Commission announced it would remind trustees “of the need to be open and transparent” amid concerns about how the foundation was spending its money. Wiggins said in 2015 the foundation was being wound down, adding: “I’m a racer not a fund raiser you know.”
Around the same time, Wiggins became caught up in an ongoing HM Revenue and Customs crackdown on what it claimed was the misuse of image-rights firms, something he revealed in a recent appearance on Lance Armstrong’s podcast, The Forward.
“When I started with Team Sky, as most cyclists are, I was self-employed with an image-rights company,” he said. “Towards the end of my tenure with Team Sky, they were involved in a two-year case with HMRC, for everyone who worked at Sky, to fight whether they were deemed employed by Sky. So, I was acting as a witness for Sky in that case against HMRC, spent an enormous amount of money on legal fees in supporting that. In the end, they [said] I was deemed employed. So, I had to go back five years and pay all the taxes and every bits and bobs and pieces. So, that had huge ramifications.”