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Questions raised for Bradley Wiggins Foundation over spending

Charity Commission advises organisation to be more transparent

The Charity Commission has contacted the trustees of Bradley Wiggins' sporting charity about concerns over how the organisation has spending the money it has raised.

The Bradley Wiggins Foundation was created in 2012 to "promote regular healthy recreation by encouraging participation in sport" and has run a couple of sportives and a charity ball. But it appears to have been inactive for over a year, and Wiggins has said that it is being "scaled down" because of his racing commitments.

A Charity Commission spokesman told road.cc: “We have been made aware of concerns about how the Bradley Wiggins Foundation is spending money which has been donated to it.

“We have contacted the trustees to clarify how the funds are being applied and remind them of the need to be open and transparent in dealing with donors and the public in accounting for how the charity’s funds have been used.”

The Bradley Wiggins Foundation is expected to file accounts with the Charity Commission next February.

It supports the Wiggle Honda team, the An Post Racing team and has sponsored a series of criterium races at Salt Ayre in Lancaster.

The foundation ran two Ride With Brad sportives in 2012 and 2013 and a charity ball in 2012. It lists no contact details on its four-page website. An attempt to contact the organisation through an email address provided by Ellmore Consultancy yielded an automatic response promoting the 2013 Ride With Brad.

At the end of August, Bradley Wiggins told The Guardian's WIll Fotheringham: "[The Bradley Wiggins Foundation] will keep going but it’s not going to be a huge thing; like all things it takes time and effort and if I’m focusing on the Olympics in the next two years I have to look again at what I do.

"We’ve put money into the Wiggle-Honda women’s team and will continue to do that; we won’t take on big events as they take so much time and resource to organise and do well."

John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work.

He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history.

Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for CyclingNews.com. Along with road.cc founder Tony Farrelly, John was on the launch team for BikeRadar.com and subsequently became editor in chief of Future Publishing’s group of cycling magazines and websites, including Cycling Plus, MBUK, What Mountain Bike and Procycling.

John has also written for Cyclist magazine, edited the BikeMagic website and was founding editor of TotalWomensCycling.com before handing over to someone far more representative of the site's main audience.

He joined road.cc in 2013. He lives in Cambridge where the lack of hills is more than made up for by the headwinds.

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