Former Tour de France champion Bradley Wiggins has revealed he became addicted to cocaine after retiring from cycling.
In an interview with British newspaper The Observer, the five-time Olympic gold medalist said he is “lucky” to be alive.
“There were times my son thought I was going to be found dead in the morning,” the 45-year-old Wiggins said. “I was a functioning addict. People wouldn’t realize. I was high for most of the time for years.”
The British cyclist was a gold medalist in four straight Olympics from 2004 and won the Tour in 2012. He retired in 2016.
In 2022, he made an allegation in an interview with Men’s Health UK magazine that he was sexually groomed by a coach, whose name he did not reveal, when he was 13 years old.
In a soon-to-be-published autobiograph, The Chain, Wiggins detailed how his life spiraled into a cycle of debt and addiction after retirement from the sport.
Wiggins told the Observer his cocaine addiction became a “really bad problem” and he was “walking a tightrope.” He quit his addiction a year ago, the newspaper said.
“I already had a lot of self-hatred, but I was amplifying it,” he said. “It was a form of self-harm and self-sabotage. It was not the person I wanted to be. I realized I was hurting a lot of people around me.”