Bradley Wiggins has cut the final ties with his previous management company XIX as he take full control of Team Wiggins.
Simon Fuller's XIX had held a 40 per cent stake in the Team Wiggins racing squad but papers filed at Companies House in the last week show that these have now been transferred to Wiggins Right limited, the company that Wiggins uses to manage many of his commercial interests.
Wiggins first joined XIX as a client in 2013, when the company also managed sports megastars including footballer David Beckham, tennis ace Andy Murry and Formula 1 champion Lewis Hamilton.
The company played a role in setting up his eponymous team in 2015 and launching his own bike brand with Halfords. It also helped Wiggins to broker a deal to appear in adverts for Skoda for three years from 2017.
However, by the time the Skoda deal was underway the relationship had begun to sour in the wake of the news that Wiggins had therapeutic use exemptions (TUEs) to use controlled drug triamcinolone ahead of the 2011 and 2012 Tours de France and the 2013 Giro d’Italia, which was revealed by Russian hacker Fancy Bears in September 2016.
Wiggins reportedly was not happy with the support he had received from XIX during a time of intense media scrutiny and switched management to M&C Saatchi Merlin in January 2017.
At the time XIX was understood to continue to be working on joint ventures, such as the team, with Wiggins. But the documents published for the first time today show that is no longer the case and Cycling Weekly understands that XIX has had little to do with the running of the team since the split in 2017.
