Bradley Wiggins faces the toughest stage of his career. He is neither road nor track, modalities in which he competed as a professional cyclist and with which he achieved glory: four Olympic golds and seven world titles. At the top, the 2012 Tour de France and the road world championship held in Ponferradina, in 2014. The most successful athlete in the history of the Olympic Games in his discipline now faces the threat of bankruptcy, according to the British magazine, Cycling Weekly.
Liquidators of the Briton’s company reveal that a claim worth £1m is still unpaid and are putting up for sale the rights to the trademarks of his own name, ‘Bradley Wiggins’, ‘Wiggins’ and ‘Wiggo’, company properties, to try to reverse the economic debt.
“This is a very historic matter involving professional negligence on the part of [others] that has left a lot of shit with my name on it to deal with! “It happens to many athletes while doing the graft and, as a result, there will be a series of legal claims from my lawyers left, right and center,” the athlete tells Cycling Weekly.
The company that ran much of the rider’s affairs during his career, Wiggins Rights Limited, went into liquidation in September 2020. This was the parent company of the now defunct Team Wiggins. The 2012 Tour de France winner has been in an Individual Voluntary Arrangement (IVA) for three years, an individual financial arrangement designed to try to pay creditors and avoid bankruptcy.
In December 2020, shortly after his companies went into liquidation, a spokesperson said that Wiggins’ involvement in the companies was “not on a daily basis” and that “this in no way affects Bradley’s personal solvency.”
Likewise, Wiggins would have put a property in Spain for sale worth 600,000 pounds. A measure that has not served to alleviate the risk of bankruptcy either, since Wiggins’ VAT supervisor said that the cyclist received a “notification of non-compliance” with the conditions of his contract, according to the British magazine.
