Sir Bradley Wiggins has revealed that he smashed up his knighthood and Sports Personality of the Year award and threw them into a flower bed.
The cyclist is one of the few athletes to have both the honours, having received his SPOTY award in 2012 after his history-making Tour de France win, and his knighthood for services to cycling the following year.
However, in the immortal words of Shania Twain, they don’t impress him much.
Speaking on his podcast The Bradley Wiggins Show, the 39-year-old explained that he smashed up his honours to prove a point to his children Ben and Isabella.
Bradley said: ‘They say, “you must polish that trophy, you must keep your medals safe”. I don’t, I keep it in a plastic bag… because they assume that’s what you do with that stuff, but I don’t.
‘I smashed my Sports Personality trophy, I smashed my knighthood in front of my kids and chucked them in the flower bed to make a point to them.
‘I wanted to show them that it’s not the material items that we now polish on the mantelpiece for the rest of our lives to elevate dad in our household as something special.’
Wiggins told presenter Graham Willgoss and guest Steve Cummings on the Eurosport podcast: ‘That’s not the success. The success is that I applied myself, like Steve did, to something and the application and to sacrifice so much.
‘You get held to that perception from the first part of your life, but I don’t live off that now. I don’t need that for my self-worth and my ego. You’ve got to find that elsewhere.’
Wiggins, known for his mod style, won gold at the London Olympic games, and became the first ever British winner of the Tour de France the same year.
After retiring in 2016, he is now training to be a social worker, having enrolled for a degree at an open university.
Despite being one of the UK’s most recognisable athletes, his success came under the spotlight, following claims that a jiffy bag containing corticosteroid triamcinolone was delivered to Team Sky for Wiggins’ use at the 2011 Critérium du Dauphiné.
Both Wiggins and Team Sky have denied that any drugs were used without medical need.
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