Bradley Wiggins’s pain shows us that welfare, not medals, should be a priority

It’s hard to recall Bradley Wiggins sitting on his throne at Hampton Court, riding into Paris with the yellow jersey, or ringing the bell to start the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony without now seeing through to the secret he was carrying inside him on all those occasions. It took Wiggins nearly three decades to share his experience of grooming at the age of 13. It took Pam Shriver four decades to share her story of an emotionally abusive relationship with a coach.

What about the other stories that haven’t yet been heard? While there is shock and sympathy, we must go further to draw out what needs to change and why change still hasn’t happened.

After the revelations from Wiggins and Shriver, there has never been a more important time for any of us involved in sport, whether as athletes, coaches, parents, leaders, volunteers or journalists, to realise our responsibility to change. To challenge our assumptions about what healthy grassroots and high-performance sport looks and feels like. And to take positive action to create a different experience of sport for current and future generations.

There seem to be three key messages from the stories of the past week. First, that safe sport must be the first priority, but for many, it still isn’t; second, that certain aspects of high-performance environments that are often admired – from behaviours of obsessive dedication, placing winning above everything else and the power balance within coach-athlete relationships – contribute to a darker side of sport that brings heavy long-term costs; and third, that our focus on heroic narratives throughout sport is at best misleading and at times deeply damaging, distracting us from the real stories of the people behind the hero