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Sir Bradley Wiggins says the “haunting experience” of his father’s jealousy drove him to become a Tour winner.
Wiggins, who retired from cycling in 2016, became the first Briton to win the Tour de France in 2012.
“A lot of my cycling career was about running away from my past really,” said Wiggins, who was speaking on Imposter Syndrome, out on iPlayer on Friday.
The new BBC series focuses on a number of figures who discuss their experiences in the public eye.
Wiggins says his father, also a former cyclist, walked out on him when he was 18 months old and that meeting him again when he was 19 was the “hardest day” of his life.
He says his dad told him he would not be “as good as his old man”.
However, during his career, Wiggins accumulated 35 career victories, including five Olympic gold medals in a personal haul of eight for Great Britain and seven world titles on the track.
“It was a good distraction and a lot of it intrinsically linked around my father and the lack of a father figure as a child,” said Wiggins of cycling.
“One day he read in a magazine a ‘B. Wiggins’ in the results [when he was] in Australia, and he thought, ‘that must be Bradley’.
“He wanted to be part of the success and make up for all those years.
“I eventually met him two years later, when I was 19, because he had no money, and he came over to Belgium to a race I was doing and I’ll never forget it.
“I was 19. I was racing against men and shining and he couldn’t handle it, he couldn’t handle the attention on me.
“He said to me, ‘just [don’t] forget you’ll never be as good as your old man’ – he squeezed my arm and came in quite close to me so no one else could hear. It was quite a haunting experience.
“From that day on, there was this drive for so long after that to be better than him.”
When he was asked if his experiences spurred on his ambition to succeed in 2012, the now 43-year-old Wiggins said: “I think so, yeah.”