Wiggins reveals cause of nine-year feud with Froome: "I never felt able to trust him again"

Wiggins was the first Briton ever to win the Tour in 2012, but it did not go without a struggle. In the grueling eleventh stage to La Toussuire, the Brit was already wearing the yellow jersey, but it was teammate Froome who accelerated four kilometers from the finish line. Wiggins would eventually finish sixth, two seconds behind Froome, who finished third.

The consequences did not seem significant, but that evening, the bomb exploded at Team Sky. According to Wiggins, Froome had tried to win the stage, while his task was “support my push for victory in Paris,” according to Wiggins. “It was the last thing I ever expected to happen and it unsettled me massively, to the extent that later, at the team hotel, I threatened to walk.”

“My mind was clear. F**k it! I don’t need this! That might sound mad, but to win the Tour you need to be in control of as much as humanly possible,” said the eventual winner. “For a threat to come from your own flank is hugely disconcerting. If you can’t trust the guys in the same kit, who can you trust?”

People higher up were needed to calm things down (at least temporarily). “In the end, Dave Brailsford and Sky sporting director Sean Yates managed to talk me down. But from that point on, I never felt able to trust Chris,” he says harshly. We saw that trust was gone in the final stage in Paris.

“Like I say, riding on the front during those last few kilometres around Paris was partly to lessen my likelihood of crashing," Wiggins recalls. “But I was also determined that Chris shouldn’t benefit from any last-gasp hiccup and end up on top of the podium.”

Ultimately, this would cause end with “two top riders were in tatters” and there was also a clear “collapse of trust” between the two teammates. Wiggins would never ride the Tour again, while Froome, who suffered a serious crash earlier this year, would ultimately win the Tour de France four times.

Back to 2012, when Wiggins invited the entire Sky team to a star-studded evening to raise money. Or rather, everyone? “Everyone who had helped me win the Tour, except Chris,” Wiggins recalls. A decision he would come to regret. “I hurt him, and I shouldn’t have.”

A “pathetic call,” as Wiggins himself called it. Yet it wasn't settled until nine years later. At the end of the 2021 Tour, the Tour winner from nine years earlier called his former teammate Froome. "Chris, I’m sorry.’ I wanted to settle it. The awkwardness had been going on for so long and it was paining me."

“More than anything, though, Chris was a genuinely lovely guy, and I hurt him, and I shouldn’t have” Wiggins says self-critically. “To be able to speak to him again, to say sorry, was so liberating. It was unhealthy for me to carry that bitterness around. Being Chris’s friend again means an incredible amount,” the Brit concludes.