• Sir Bradley Wiggins comes 21st in the 2km event at Indoor Championships • Former Tour winner finishes well over his six minute and five second target

Live with it long enough, and competition gets to be addictive. Bradley Wiggins, who retired from cycling this time last year, was back racing at the Olympic Velodrome on Saturday. Only he was not on a bike but a rowing machine, taking part in the British Indoor Championships.

Wiggins has always daydreamed about being an Olympic rower but only took up the sport seriously nine months or so ago. He discovered he had such a talent for it that he started practising full time. There has been talk that he might even take a run at qualifying for the Olympic team in 2020, though most of that has come from his coach James Cracknell, who has never been shy of a little publicity.

Cracknell predicted that Wiggins would clock just over 6min in the 2,000m here, and Wiggins was targeting 6min 2sec. Which turned out to be optimistic. Wiggins finished in 6min 22.5sec, some 30sec behind the winner, Adam Neil. “He’s got a way to go but for a beginner 6.22 isn’t that bad,” Neil said afterwards. “I don’t think he should be disappointed, because he’ll improve very fast.”

It was, after all, Wiggins’s first ever 2,000m race, and he was competing against five members of the GB team. Plucky defeat, though, is not exactly Wiggins’s thing, and he was so annoyed with the result that he stalked off without talking to anybody. He put out a statement later on explaining that he had dropped his oar because he mistakenly thought there had been a false start in a “schoolboy error”.

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Either way, British Rowing were happy to have him here. These championships do not typically draw much of an audience outside of the rowers and cross-fit fanatics, but there was a thicket of photographers, journalists and film crews in front of Wiggins’s machine. Not that he wanted the recognition. He wears his hair long these days, and has grown a beard so bushy you would blunt scissors trying to cut it. He was sporting a thick white headband and a bright blue tracksuit too. It was an unlikely look. He might have been auditioning for the next Wes Anderson movie rather than a spot in the GB rowing squad.

It is certainly possible to switch between rowing and cycling, since there is a lot of crossover in the attributes you need to succeed in the two sports. Rebecca Romero won Olympic medals in both.

And Hamish Bond, who won two Olympic gold medals in the coxless pair, just won a bronze in the time trial at the Oceania cycling championships. But they were rowers who started cycling, and Wiggins is trying to do it the other way around. Which, the sport scientists say, is much harder, especially when actually out on the water.

“Rowing indoors and rowing on water are polar opposites,” Neil pointedly said, when he was asked about Wiggins’s chances of making the Olympics. “It takes years and years to learn the fine movements you need to row fast on water.”

Out there, a rower needs the technique to cope with the wind and currents. The idea that Wiggins, who is 37, could make the sort of switch which Romero did seems pretty fanciful.

Rather, this all just seems to be part of Wiggins’s adjustment to life after cycling, an attempt to answer the great “what now?” that every athlete confronts when they quit. Wiggins wrote in his autobiography that he dreamed of being an Olympic rower but admitted “it would be impossible to do: go down, lock, stock and barrel, live in Henley, train and try and be at the next Olympics in a rowing boat. It’s never going to happen, but it would be a different challenge.” And indoor rowing seems a better bet than ski jumping, which is what he was doing last winter.

Wiggins’s retirement, of course, has been an especially tricky one. His reputation has been battered after his questionable Therapeutic Use Exemptions was exposed by the Fancy Bears hacking group, and UK Anti-Doping launched an investigation into a mystery package delivered to him at the Critérium du Dauphiné in 2011. Ukad wrapped up that inquiry last month, because there was not enough evidence to work with. Wiggins hoped that would end the matter but it has only left a lot of unanswered questions about Team Sky’s lack of medical records and the inaccuracies in their initial explanations.

Wiggins’s legacy is painted many shades of grey, and there’s no escaping that. Even here. Ukad had set up a stand to one side of the velodrome, where they were handing out branded swag, frisbees, keyrings, and plastic wallets, little cards with the number for the anti-doping hotline and informational leaflets about the perils of PEDs and how to compete clean. They had happened to lay their table out in front of a huge picture of Wiggins, celebrating one of his many victories.

At this point, indoor rowing feels pretty damn apt because, hard as Wiggins pulls, there is no getting away.