Sadness

Former Love Island star Malin Andersson has revealed that she’s “quitting the UK” revealing in an emotional reel that she had “no ties left” after “29 years of sadness”

Love Island star Malin Andersson has revealed she’s “quitting the UK”- after revealing there was “nothing left” in her hometown for her.

Malin, who rose to fame on the second season of the Love Island dating show in 2016 took to Instagram this morning to reveal the reasoning behind her decision.

The former Love Island star is currently in Portugal with her daughter Xaya, as she gave her followers an update on their living situation. “Update. Me and Xaya are in Madeira. My best friend lives here and we’re going to be here for a week before I go on my next adventure to Barcelona, because I’ll be dropping her off to see her dad for a week,” she said.

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Opening up about her past, Malin spoke about how she moved from Sweden to the UK when she was three, and had been in Bedfordshire ever since. “Take away work and things like that, and your safety net becomes the town that you’re in, the people, the same faces, those same things,” she continued.

However, upon reflection Malin reaslised that there was “nothing here for me.” Emotionally opening up, the star said: “I came with a family, and I’m leaving without anyone. I don’t speak to any of my siblings, they all live separate, my parents are dead, I have no family. It’s just me and Zaya.”

The 32-year-old then revealed: “I had enough. I felt like my soul was taken out of me. I was functioning being a zombie doing the same thing. When you’ve known stress, suffering, and trauma your whole life, and just s**t, you go through the healing phase, the void, you go inwards, you isolate and then you come out. And it’s like, I need change, so that’s what I’ve done.”

Malin then explained how she had “no ties” in England whatsoever, and needed “adventure, fun, travel and joy.”

She then went on to say she was recalibrating her nervous system after “coming out of the matrix” of routine, and that there was a new life waiting for her on the other side.

“It feels surreal. I’ve got a lot of grief as well. Grieving the c**p life that I had. 29 years of sadness really. Obviously I’ve had Xaya, that’s been my highlight. But just loneliness, grief, the way I’ve been treated by people, losing my family. I guess I’m just grieving at the moment.”

In the caption, Malin wrote: “I didn’t realise until the day I decided to leave that the area we are born into is designed to keep us there… forever.

“Until we realise the more we expand and break free into the world, our external reality will reward our nervous system by expanding the abundance that’s available to us.”

Just a year after her stint in the villa, Malin tragically lost her mother to stomach cancer. Four years later, in 2022, the Love Island star announced the birth of Xaya with then boyfriend Jared. However, just weeks after Xaya’s birth, the couple decided to call it quits.

Writing on Twitter at the time, Malin said: “I have always prided myself on being open and transparent on here, so I wanted to let you all know that myself and Jared are no longer together. We split around 4 weeks ago and I have since been trying to come to terms with everything and process it all.

“We are co-parenting Xaya as she of course comes first in all of this, but we would appreciate some space as we navigate through this separation.”

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In an interview with the Observer, Wiggins said of his post-career cocaine addiction: “There were times my son thought I was going to be found dead in the morning.

“I was a functioning addict. People wouldn’t realise – I was high most of the time for many years.”

Wiggins – a gangly north Londoner, from a broken home, brought up in poverty – made it to the very top of a sport that requires clinical preparation and a calm head under pressure.

In interviews during his career, Wiggins exuded calm and charm. He seemed to have everything under control.

And perhaps it was, with the hyper-organised, big-budget Team Sky around him between 2010 and 2015, run by Dave Brailsford and Rod Ellingworth – with whom he would win the 2012 Tour, the 2014 world time trial championship and much more.

Wiggins’ talent and presence inspired the team to a period of domination in road cycling never before seen.

But post-career, his troubles spiralled.

In 2020, his marriage to Cath came to an end. They have two children: Ben – now a rider himself with Hamens Berman Jayco – and Isabella.

Then came the collapse of Team Wiggins, which he had founded in 2015. The team lacked enough blue chip sponsors, despite having so many talented British riders. There was an awful more of Wiggins’ own money invested in the team than most realised.

That, and a cocaine addiction, would spell trouble for anybody’s wallet – even a sporting icon. And Wiggins was declared bankrupt.

“I already had a lot of self-hatred,” said Wiggins of his post-career addiction. “But I was amplifying it. It was a form of self-harm and self-sabotage. It was not the person I wanted to be. I realised I was hurting a lot of people around me.

“There’s no middle ground for me. I can’t just have a glass of wine – if I have a glass of wine, then I’m buying drugs. My proclivity to addiction was easing the pain that I lived with.”

Wiggins’ former team boss Jonathan Vaughters – who now heads the EF Education-EasyPost World Tour team – understands why Wiggins has come across the problems he has. But that it’s not through a lack of self-awareness.

“I mean, ultimately pro cyclists are always going to search for that dopamine hit they got while racing,” Vaughters said. “[It] makes them an easy target for addiction.

“I mean… I’d say Wiggo is far more gifted, from an IQ standpoint, than most people. He’s very sensitive to social interactions too. So, you have a guy that’s hyper intelligent, hyper aware of social interactions, and has led an extremely disciplined, but dopamine-soaked lifestyle as a professional racer… It’s a perfect storm.

“He’s very clever. No formal education at all. But he reads people like a book.”