The younger members of Team GB’s cycling squad in Rio amused themselves by addressing him as Sir Bradley. To the rest of us, he will for ever be Wiggo. He introduces himself as Bradley when we meet in London, days after his fifth and final Olympic gold medal triumph, and his unassailable place in the nation’s affections will ensure national hero status for life. More than admired, the cyclist is adored; he is the sportsman we feel we know, the one we can identify with. It seems odd, therefore, that the adjective favoured by those who work most closely with him is almost invariably “complex”. Reflecting on coming towards the end of a spectacular career – he is riding this week’s Tour of Britain, the London Six next month and the Ghent Six Day in November before allegedly retiring – the consensus in Rio among journalists and cyclists was that Bradley Wiggins remained “an enigma”.

Wiggins is a bit puzzled by this himself. “I had to Google it. What does enigma actually mean?”

He stepped off the plane from Rio less than 48 hours earlier and looks remarkably sharp in skinny jeans and a close-fitting T-shirt, but there is a diffidence about his bearing that may or may not be down to jet lag. The extensive tattoos and intermittent eye contact remind me of interviews with rock stars, and there is more than a touch of Noel Gallagher in Wiggins’ teasingly deadpan expression. But halting sentences quickly develop into disarming candour as he muses over his reputation as an enigma.

No excuse for Lizzie Armitstead’s missed drugs tests, says Bradley Wiggins Read more

“Maybe I’m perceived that way because I think while I’m talking and I’m honest and open, and I talk about things that upset me, vulnerability, and things that have happened in the past that have affected the way I am today,” he says. “I’ve got a habit of just talking and talking and talking, and elaborating far too much. What you see is what you get.”

That shouldn’t make him an enigma, but it certainly makes him an anomaly. The first time I saw Wiggins interviewed on television, he was on course to becoming Britain’s first winner of the Tour de France, in 2012. The skinny, tattooed man with sideburns looked and sounded so unlike a professional sportsman, for a moment I thought I was watching a spoof.

“Well, most post-race interviews end up becoming an interview of cliches,” he agrees. “I always find that just quite mundane and boring and rehearsed. So I find it easier just to be myself, because then I don’t trip myself up.”

Instead of the conventional, formulaic script about performance times and personal challenges, we were introduced to a laconic mod with a dry wit. Handed the microphone on the podium in Paris, he joked, “Right, we’re just going to draw the raffle numbers.” The French may have been nonplussed, but Britain fell in love. The Sun issued cut-out-and-keep paper sideburns; Wiggins was chosen to strike the gong to open the London Olympics; and – two heady weeks and one gold medal later – was a household name who couldn’t fail to win Sports Personality of 2012 and was knighted by the end of the year.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest After receiving his gold medal for the men’s pursuit at Rio 2016, Wiggins caused a stir by gurning during the national anthem. Photograph: Tom Jenkins/The Guardian

None of the seven Olympic medals he had won by then had conferred the kind of acclaim or wealth the Tour de France delivered. But Wiggins returned to the track, set a new world record last year for the farthest distance cycled in one hour – 54.526km – and flew to Rio this summer for one more bid at gold. With the medal around his neck and the national anthem playing, Wiggins bade farewell to a 16-year Olympic career by sticking his tongue out at the camera.

“I don’t know,” he offers sheepishly. “It was just spontaneous. We were just stood there and I got quite embarrassed because my stupid big head came on the screen and we were all just stood looking at the screen, and then it just focused right on my head up on the screen, and it just… It’s just my introvert character, like when I was at school and the attention was on me, I’d do something stupid. I just think it’s an uneasiness with all the attention, you know.”

His team-mates on the podium fell about laughing, but I ask if anyone took offence. “I think there might have been some of that,” he mumbles. “You know, there’s always going to be someone. I mean, Piers Morgan had a go at me four years ago for not singing the national anthem.” Did Wiggins care? “I don’t know him.” Pointedly, he adds, “I’ll know things are bad when I go on Piers Morgan’s Life Stories. That’s when I’d be scraping the barrel.”

It’s not an entirely throwaway line. Wiggins has been a competitive cyclist since his teens; now, at 36, he has to work out what to do with the rest of his life. On one matter at least he is clear: “You don’t want to become just this pointless celebrity who’s here, there and everywhere, going on Can’t Cook, Won’t Cook. I don’t want to become a captain on Question Of Sport and go on every week playing the fool.”

I arrive at the track and think, I don’t want to do this ever again. This is horrible, this. I hate it

He talks about his future ruminatively, weaving between subdued introspection and animated riffs. Winning the Tour de France made him wealthy enough never to need to work again – “Not if I was careful” – but he says so with no obvious pleasure. “Cos you’ve got to do something, haven’t you? I can’t just retire now like I’m 64, and go in an old age pensioners’ home and sit in an armchair all day with a blanket on. I have to do something.

“I can’t go and get a normal job. I can’t go and work in Sainsbury’s next week stacking shelves, so I might as well use the success I’ve had to do things I feel are positive. People ask me all the time, ‘What’s your legacy?’ I don’t know how I want to be remembered on the bike. But I don’t want people to look back in 10 years and say, ‘Do you remember that famous cyclist with the sideburns? Whatever happened to him?’ And it’s like, ‘He was on the telly for ages, weren’t he? On all those game shows. And then he sort of disappeared.’ And then you read about me in the Mirror, walking through the park or something, you know, down and out. So I think about it a lot. Where do I want to be in 20 years’ time?”

Wiggins isn’t sorry he won’t race in another Olympics: his overriding sensation on winning gold last month was not joy or euphoria, but relief. “You’re just like: thank God that’s done.”

It wasn’t that conditions in Rio were dreadful, although, due to the “sanitation and crime and stuff”, he did keep his two children in England. His worst Olympics, by a mile, had been Beijing, in 2008. “It just had no soul to it, it was very sterile. Obviously nothing could top the atmosphere in London, but I thought Rio was actually really good.”

Nor, contrary to some media reports, did he have a big row with his fellow cyclist and friend, Mark Cavendish. Disappointed to be excluded from the team pursuit in Rio, Cavendish had said Wiggins “wants to be the hero”, and was absent from the velodrome when the team won gold. “That got all blown out of proportion,” Wiggins says. Wiggins received no congratulations from Chris Froome, the British rider who has won three Tours de France since 2013 and with whom he has a bumpy relationship, either. “But I mean, I wouldn’t expect him to, to be honest. We’re not really that close.”

The thing he won’t miss about the Olympics is the mental torture of pre-race tension. “If someone said to me now, ‘Let’s go out there and just do a team pursuit’, I could just do it without thinking, much like you get up out of a chair and walk. But there you can start overthinking the process.

“Then I’m just talking to myself constantly, like, why are you getting nervous? It’s only like what you did in training last week, and you weren’t nervous then, so why are you getting nervous now? Then I’ll read for a bit and I’ll find myself reading the same page again, because you start thinking again, so you can’t focus on anything. That’s what it’s like for the days before. Even when you arrive at the track, you’re thinking, in four hours it’s going to be finished, it’s all going to be done, this. Then it’s three hours to go. And at that point you think, I don’t want to do this ever again. This is horrible, this. I hate it.”

Even now, Wiggins can’t bear to consider the possibility that Team GB might have lost. “I get really stressed about it and it starts to scare me, actually, because we won by 0.7sec, and I start thinking: God, we could have lost. So I can’t let myself think about it. That’s why this is like having a burden lifted.” For the first time since last Christmas, he can “just relax and have a nice meal and a drink”.

Wiggins could be forgiven for dreading the next chapter, though, because the most difficult times in his life have followed the biggest races. His father, a hard-drinking Australian cyclist, walked out when Wiggins was two, leaving his mother to raise him alone on a working-class estate in Kilburn, north-west London. Inspired by Chris Boardman in the 1992 Olympics, Wiggins took up cycling at 12, raced through his teens and, with National Lottery funding, won a bronze medal at the Sydney Olympics in 2000. Having inherited his father’s “addictive, obsessive streak”, he dedicated the next four years to the track, returning from Athens an Olympic gold medallist. And then he fell apart.

Lost and depressed without the discipline of a goal, Wiggins would be waiting outside his local pub at 11am, drink all day, and go home plastered to a pregnant young wife and a menacing overdraft. The birth of his son in 2005 brought him to his senses and restored his sense of purpose. “It sobered me up, literally and metaphorically, for the first time since the Olympics,” he later wrote.

A daughter followed a year later, but after winning two more gold medals in Beijing, he turned his focus to road racing, which led to “the first really big public failure of my career”. Appointed leader of the newly formed, swaggeringly confident Team Sky in the 2010 Tour de France, he has admitted he became “pompous” and “up my own arse”. After finishing a humiliating 24th in that year’s race (he’d come third the year before), Wiggins decided he had to take a break from the sport.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Winning stage 19 of the 2012 Tour de France. Photograph: Getty Images

Even the triumphs of 2012 left him facing new problems for which he was unprepared. The Lance Armstrong doping revelations that surfaced later that year exposed Wiggins to a constant barrage of, “Well, how do we know you’re not cheating as well?” which robbed him of victory’s pleasure, while his sudden celebrity horrified him. “We went home from the Olympics and needed to get some basics for the house – milk, bread – so we went in Somerfield and we came out and there’s paparazzi there. I was like, what? Wiggo getting his milk is a story? Those things were really difficult to deal with.”

I wonder whether he is bracing himself for another low. “I don’t know. I might get to March next year and I might think: God, I’m bored, or whatever. But I don’t anticipate a dip this time. I’m retiring content, for a start. I’ve achieved everything I want to achieve.”

Four years ago, Wiggins hated his new fame and “wanted everything to go back to normal”. But when I ask if he still wants his old anonymity back, he shakes his head. “It took about two years to come to terms with being hit over the head with a hammer with this fame thing, and shying away from it going, ‘I don’t want to be famous.’ But I’ve grown up with it and matured to it, and I’ve learned how to use it. It’s about finding role models for the next stage of your life.”

He has been following the post-cycling careers of Chris Boardman and Sir Chris Hoy. “They’ve got massive bike ranges, they’re on TV, they’re educating people about what’s happening in bike races. Or, in other sports, Michael Johnson and Michael Jordan, or Gary Lineker – look at what he’s done. And I look up to those people and think that’s who I want to be like, as opposed to the Paul Gascoignes of this world.” So when the team he’s assembled to manage his post-competitive career asked if he had any ideas, he told them, “Well, I’ve always had this idea to design kids’ bikes. Because no one else does them.”

Is it easy to miss three drugs tests as Lizzie Armitstead did? ‘No. That’s ridiculous. I can’t fathom how that happened’

People are forever approaching Wiggins to tell him that he inspired them to get on a bike. The popularity of cycling has soared in the course of his career, and when I suggest he had a lot to do with this, he allows, “Maybe a bit.” As a child, he had to hide his Lycra in a bag as he cycled out of his estate, and dared put it on only once he was a safe distance away from the local boys who would tease and bully him. But a little while ago he spent a day at the velodrome in east London for a charity race “with about 20 kids from a local estate in Hackney that had sort of gone off the rails, involved in gangs, this, that and the other. And they’d all been kitted out with bikes and helmets and Lycra and everything. And these kids were just blown away by the fact I was there. That really struck me then. I just think that’s a testament to how far the sport’s come.”

Wiggins has designed a children’s range for Halfords, from balance bikes for toddlers up to road bikes for teens. “I just want to throw all that energy into ideas I’ve had in my head for years. It’s about grassroots and youth and finding the next Bradley Wiggins, as it were, or just inspiring the next generation.”

He looks happiest of all when mentioning the 2004 photograph of a 12-year-old Laura Trott standing beside Wiggins, wearing the gold medal he’d won in Athens. “And now she’s won four gold medals. To think that another Laura Trott’s out there somewhere, who started by riding on one of these bikes – and in 10 years’ time they’ll be in a picture saying, ‘This was my first bike, and I’m an Olympic champion, and it’s because I watched Brad in Rio win the team pursuit.’ Those things are the important legacy.”

The astonishing success of the whole Team GB cycling squad in Rio has raised eyebrows in some quarters. French, Australian and German cyclists all made comments such as, “The recipe should be asked for,” and, “We are human beings like them, we are made of the same stuff, we have a bike like they do, so why are they better?” But Wiggins looks untroubled: “Well, there’s been a lot of innuendo, and people saying, ‘I’m not saying they’re cheating, what I’m saying is it doesn’t make any sense.’ It’s like, well, what are you saying then?” The insinuation is that there must have been doping.

“When you dominate something to the degree that Team GB dominated, that’s going to cause ill-feeling. But we peak every four years because of British cycling and the lottery funding thing is about winning medals at the Olympic Games. So I think there’s a bit of sore-loser type.” Besides, he adds, “In this day and age, I don’t think anyone could get away with it. I’m talking blood doping. I just think it’s nigh on impossible now.”

But when I ask if it would have been better for all concerned had the British rider Lizzie Armitstead not been allowed to compete, after missing three drug tests in a row, he looks uneasy. “Umm, I don’t know. I just think that rules are rules, and they’re there for a reason.” Is it easy to miss three tests in a row by mistake? “No.” His bluntness takes me by surprise. Not even slightly? “No,” he repeats, maintaining a level stare.

Is it practically impossible? “Well, it’s bloody hard because what happens is you miss one test, they write you a letter, they ask you to explain what happened and you’ve got two weeks to put a case forward. If you ignore that and then you get another one, you end up having crisis meetings. You get a lot of support from UK Sport. They’re brilliant, actually. They’re on the phone daily. They send you emails, reminders, they’ll put plans in place for you in terms of someone helping you with the whereabouts, so you don’t end up… well, it’s very difficult, then, to go from two to three. And to get three within eight or nine months, there’s no excuse. When you’re a professional athlete and you’re a world champion, there’s no excuse, because it’s your career. You’re setting the standard for everybody else, and to say, ‘Cycling wasn’t my priority at that time’ [as Armitstead did] is ludicrous, because you nearly lost your career over it. That’s just ridiculous. So I can’t fathom how that happened.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Wiggins wins BBC Sports Personality of the Year Awards 2012. Photograph: PA

For years, media coaches have been trying to teach Wiggins to steer clear of controversial subjects. It hasn’t worked. On the referendum vote to leave the EU, he offers, “It was too complex an issue to leave to the public, because most people are thick.” He says he doesn’t follow politics, but has always voted Labour. “I grew up Labour, and you have to vote. You can’t not vote. For Russell Brand to ponce about telling people not to vote – well, they’re just morons.”

If Wiggins’ team were hoping for a more diplomatic Sir Bradley in retirement, they will be disappointed. His fans would be even more disappointed if he did – which feels unlikely – master the professional athlete’s bland veneer. Anyway, Wiggins thinks his inability to hide his explains why others find him an enigma.

“Well, I just think people perhaps sometimes get confused, because I show them how I’m feeling daily. So if I’m feeling miserable about something else that’s on my mind, I can’t go into a press conference and switch all that off and go, ‘Yes, everything’s great, this, that and the other.’ I’ll sit there and I’ll be moody and I’ll go, ‘I feel like shit today.’ And people are like, ‘Well, he was lovely yesterday, and he’s just walked past me today and not said hello. I can’t work him out.’

“But I am what I am. People like to put tags on people and say [about me], ‘He’s the nicest bloke you’ll ever meet.’ And I think, ‘He’s not, actually. He’s a bit of a cunt.’ I’m sorry for the language, but you can’t be that good at cycling without that in you. I don’t think anyone can be successful and be a super-nice person. You have to be selfish.”

• The Wiggins bike range is available in Halfords shops and at halfords.com.