Olympics legend Bradley Wiggins snorted cocaine from gold medal
An Olympic legend has revealed shocking details of his spiral into homelessness in his first tell-all interview about how his life fell apart.
Sir Bradley Wiggins has admitted he does not know how he is still alive after his drug addiction led him to snort cocaine off his Olympic gold medal.
The legendary cyclist revealed he was “high most of the time for many years” following his retirement.
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Wiggins became the first Briton to win the Tour de France in 2012 and he followed it up with a gold medal in the London Olympics - his fifth time at the top of a Games’ podium, The Sun reports.
But six years later he was in the throes of a cocaine addiction which cost him his marriage and almost his life.
He told The Times how he holed up in a hotel for two weeks consuming cocaine - possibly as much as 120 grams.
Asked how he did not die, Wiggins responded: “I don’t know. I don’t like to think about it.”
Wiggins, 45, filed for bankruptcy last year after running out of money to pay for hotels and drugs.
He ended up in a crackhouse in Middlesbrough and slept in his car and on park benches in Clapham Common.
One binge saw him smash up his Sports Personality of the Year award, while he also snorted cocaine of his Olympic gold medal.
An extract from Wiggins’ upcoming book reads: “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***ing on someone’s grave, and in that moment I was p***ing 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 has been in recovery for a year after his friend, former cyclist Lance Armstrong, got him into a rehab program.
He was persuaded to do so after that bleak incident in Middlesbrough, along with a tearful plea for help he sent to his son Ben, 20, who he felt would not judge him.
Wiggins says he has a good relationship with Ben and his daughter Bella, 19, as well as his ex-wife Cath.
He is now in a relationship with an American woman and lives close enough to the mother of his youngest daughter, 5, that he is able to take her to school every day.
— This story originally appeared on The Sun and has been republished with permission
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