Unsavoury reputation … Bradley Wiggins’s father, Garry, in 1977.
Triomphe and tragedy: cycling champ’s father took a wrong turn
Damien Murphy
AS THE world celebrates Bradley Wiggins’s Tour de France victory, a conspiracy of silence still hangs over the death in the Hunter Valley of his father, a champion cyclist with an unsavoury reputation for using drugs.
Gary Wiggins represented Australia in the 1970s but four years ago he was discovered unconscious in an Aberdeen street after being dragged out of a party at a nearby house one summer evening.
The coroner Elaine Truscott later ruled Wiggins had been assaulted before his death at the party in January 2008.
And although she called some witnesses liars, she stopped short of recommending charges against two men who had been at the party. The town has remained silent ever since.
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In some ways, Wiggins ended up not far from where he began, for he was born in Yallourn, a brown coal town in Victoria’s Gippsland, not dissimilar to Aberdeen.
Aberdeen started in the 1830s as one of the first villages in the Hunter Valley to water the squattocracy and their horses on the way to the Black Soil Plains. But, wedged between Scone’s thoroughbred horse studs and Muswellbrook’s coalmines, Aberdeen these days is a hardscrabble town saddled with the twin notoriety of Wiggins’s death and being the birthplace of Katherine Knight, the first Australian woman to be sentenced to life imprisonment without parole in 2001 for killing her partner.
Wiggins’s sister, Glenda Hughes, hoped the publicity surrounding her nephew’s win in France might stir consciences in Aberdeen.
”I’m hoping that what Bradley is doing will stir something in someone to come forward and tell us what happened in that house,” said Mrs Hughes, from Victoria.
After being found in Segenhoe Street, Aberdeen, Wiggins died the following day in Newcastle. He was 55 and had been estranged from his now famous son for years. A ne’er-do-well tearaway drunk and drug user who sported a teardrop tattoo beneath one of his eyes, he ended up as a painter in Muswellbrook.
Four decades earlier, Wiggins was a professional champion who represented Australia at various world titles and won national titles in the one kilometre time trial and 4000 metres team pursuit in 1977.
He moved to Britain in 1976 and raced on the Continent for nine years but gained a reputation both as a hard party-goer and for supplying amphetamines to fellow racers.
Along the way, he married an English woman, Linda, and they had a son, Bradley,
• The Sun, London: Wiggins: My alcoholic dad could never tell me how proud he was It was bloody hard out there and a large part of me admires him for having a go — sometimes riders would ride for 42 out of 43 days. But he burned the candle at both ends and plunged into a steady and depressing decline. It wasn’t until 1997 that he phoned me out of the blue from Australia — I was in the build-up to earn selection for the Sydney Olympics and hadn’t seen or heard from him since London Zoo in 1983. Tales of his racing had helped feed my interest in cycling, although the true inspiration was that Olympic gold medal won by Chris Boardman in Barcelona. Garry was an emotional mess and said he was sorry for everything.
