British Olympic icon and Tour de France winner Bradley Wiggins has admitted he doens’t know how he’s still alive after cocaine binges saw him sniffing it off his Olympic gold medal
Sir Bradley Wiggins has admitted he doesn’t know how he’s still alive after drug addiction hell saw him snorting cocaine off his Olympic medal.
Sir Brad, 45, was riding high in 2012, turning the streets of London gold during the men’s time trial – his fifth Olympic gold – a couple of weeks after he had become the first Briton to win the Tour de France.
The sky was seemingly the limit for Britain’s latest hero, but 12 months later he wasn’t in Team Sky’s Tour de France line-up and six years later a cocaine addiction would cost him his marriage and almost his life.
Speaking to The Times, Wiggo admitted, when asked how he didn’t die: “I don’t know. I don’t like to think about it.”
Sir Brad opens up about those dark times in his upcoming book: “I raged as I smashed up my 2012 trophy for Sports Personality of the Year and my knighthood: ‘This isn’t success.’
“I did that in front of my kids. No wonder there were times when they talked about trying to put me in rehab. The desecration of my Olympic medal might have happened away from their gaze but it’s equally sad to reflect on.
“Hundreds of thousands of people roaring me on, millions more watching at home.
“One of the great moments of London 2012, and there I am in a wardrobe, snorting cocaine [off my gold medal], mocking my achievement, hating it for what I believed it had brought me.
“It was the equivalent of p****** on someone’s grave, and in that moment I was p****** on my own. The gold medal, the Tour de France… All of it was dead to me. The person I’d been in Paris and London was dead to me too.”
Wiggins was helped out by an unexpected ally: disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong. The American, who had his seven Tour titles stripped after admitting to doping, offered to pay for therapy for Wiggo.
He said: “Lance, he’s helped me a lot in recent years – more so this year. We were talking about therapy, he wants to pay for me to go to this big place in Atlanta, where you go and stay for a week.
“He’s a good man. He did what he did, that’s not to condone what he did. He’s got a heart under there somewhere.”
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