'I should have paid more attention to my financial affairs' - Bradley Wiggins opens up about bankruptcy

Sir Bradley Wiggins has admitted that he should have "paid more attention" to his financial affairs while he was a professional rider, as he spoke about his troubles on the record for the first time.

Speaking on WEDŪ's The Forward w/Lance Armstrong podcast last week, the former Tour de France winner and multiple Olympic medal winner said: "One of the things I regret is I never paid attention to my financial affairs when I was racing.

"Which is one of the things that happens to athletes you know, you make a lot of money and if you haven't got your eyes on it, people take advantage."

Wiggins, who retired in 2016 after a career which saw him win eight Olympic medals, was declared bankrupt earlier this year. He entered an Individual Voluntary Arrangement (IVA), a financial agreement designed to help people pay off creditors and avoid bankruptcy, in 2022. Cycling Weekly revealed in 2022 that his liquidated company owed nearly £1 million to creditors. He is understood to have failed his IVA in January this year.

Wiggins Rights Limited, the company that ran much of Bradley Wiggins’s affairs during his career and which was the parent of the now defunct Team Wiggins, entered liquidation in September 2020. In November last year, liquidators revealed they had yet to be paid any of the £979,953 they claimed from Wiggins in 2022 in part to pay off an outstanding director's loan. Wiggins has previously said he disputes the claim.

"I realise now the importance… I should have paid more attention to it," he told Lance Armstrong's podcast. "Because you get to the point then where I'm in this situation now but because of the mess that's been created, and because it's been rumbling on for quite a few years now this hasn't just happened overnight."

In June, Wiggins told Cycling Weekly that cycling was "great distraction for everything else in my life that normal people would get time to get over"

Detailing the events that led to his bankruptcy, Wiggins explained:  "I had three companies – my image rights company that handles all my image rights, endorsement deals.

"So connected to that I joined XIX Entertainment, Simon Fuller, in 2014. And they set up various joint ventures with various clubs and companies, drinks suppliers, all different things, whatever endorsements.

"Off the bottom of that, the third company was a cycling team called New Cycling Limited, which was Team Wiggins, which was a team that was set up to facilitate the national track program, which was team pursuit, my last cycling career goal in Rio. That team should never have made a loss, it should never have made a profit, it was purely to pay the riders of the team, their wages and handle the budget.

"Now that that was done, as we see now through the lawyers, that was done purposefully. So the top company would always take the hit if there was any trouble with the other ones. 

"They should have been separate companies."

"There was a lot of money coming down from the top company to prop up these ventures that weren't making any money," he continued.

"The top company took the biggest hits when it ran up a debt of nearly one and a half million, which got given to me as a director's loan. But I wasn't the director at the time and I had to be made a director to take the loan without my knowledge. I was still riding my bike at the time. So it's a complete mess and I wasn't aware of this mess until I was deep into retirement."

Wiggins also said that he lost a lot of money after losing an employment case which saw him classified as an employee of Team Sky, rather than self-employed.

"When I left [Team] Sky, because I was a British resident, I never lived abroad – the tax laws changed,” he explained.

"And when I started with Team Sky, as most cyclists, I was self-employed with an image rights company. 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.

"I was acting as a witness for Sky in that case against HMRC and spent an enormous amount of money on legal fees because ... if I was deemed employed, I'd have had to back pay taxes and National Insurance etc."

"In the end, I was deemed employed so I had to go back five years and pay all the taxes and every bits and bobs and pieces," he continued.

The 44-year-old said that the full details of his financial situation would emerge: "This will all come out in the wash over due process in the next few years. It's just going to be a hell of a headache to get right."

Despite reports in the tabloid press that Wiggins had been practically homeless, the former Hour Record holder dismissed this as "senationalism".

He said that the press had engaged in "harassment of every member of my family and trying to dig up dirt and stories and things like this just to add weight to the fact that they think you're done and dusted".

Wiggins said that the media knew about his financial situation before it was official: "They were aware of it before it even went on the insolvency register, which shows that there must have been someone inside that leaked it to the press."

However, despite the troubles he has faced, Wiggins said that he thought everything would sort itself out: "It will be alright. But that's the first time I've commented on it since that happened."