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.
Sir Bradley Wiggins snorted cocaine off his Olympic gold medal[/caption]
Triumph at London 2012 was his fifth Olympic gold[/caption]
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.
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 pissing on someone’s grave, and in that moment I was pissing 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 recovering for a year after his friend, former cyclist Lance Armstrong, got him into a rehab programme.
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.
