Wiggins family leaned on Armstrong during cyclist cocaine addiction
Bradley Wiggins has revealed that his family leaned on shamed fellow former cyclist Lance Armstrong while the London 2012 hero was battling a cocaine addiction.
Wiggins was famously given his gold medal outside Hampton Court Palace – a week after winning the Tour de France – but has since fallen into £2m of debt and this week revealed his drug addiction.
“There were times my son thought I was going to be found dead in the morning,” said Wiggins. “I was a functioning addict. People wouldn’t realise. I was high most of the time for many years.”
But the former Team Sky rider revealed that his son would seek support from Armstrong, who was stripped of his seven Tour de France titles for taking banned performance-enhancing substances.
Lean on Armstrong
Armstrong had been “worried about me for a long time,” Wiggins, 45, told the Observer.
“He’d been through a similar thing with Jan [Ullrich, German cyclist]. They’d try and get hold of me, but couldn’t find where I was.
“My son speaks to Lance a lot. He’d ask my son, ‘How’s your Dad?’. Ben would say, ‘I’ve not heard from him for a couple of weeks, I know he’s living in a hotel.’
“They wouldn’t hear from me for days on end. I can talk about these things candidly now. There was an element of me living a lie, in not talking about it.
“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’ 2012 Tour win kick-started a golden period for British cycling, in which Chris Froome and Geraint Thomas also helped Team Sky win six editions in seven years.
Froome won four titles while Thomas and Wiggins each won one.