I was a functioning addict says Lancashire's Sir Bradley Wiggins as he admits cocaine problem

In an interview with The Observer, the 45-year-old former Tour de France winner and five-time Olympic champion spoke openly about his drug use, which he says nearly killed him.

“There were times my son thought I was going to be found dead in the morning,” Wiggins said. “I was a functioning addict. People wouldn't realise – I was high most of the time for many years.”

Wiggins, who has lived in Euxton for a number of years, retired from cycling in 2016 after a storied career that saw him win Olympic golds across the Athens, Beijing, London, and Rio Games, as well as becoming the first Briton to win the Tour de France in 2012. But after his retirement, he spiralled into depression, addiction, and financial ruin.

“I realised I had a huge problem. I had to stop. I'm lucky to be here,” he said. “I already had a lot of self-hatred, but I was amplifying it. It was a form of self-harm and self-sabotage. It was not the person I wanted to be. I realised I was hurting a lot of people around me.”

“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, who says he has now been clean for a year, also credited disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong for helping him through recovery.

Armstrong, stripped of his seven Tour de France titles for doping, has been offering to pay for Wiggins’ therapy.

“He’d worried about me for a long time,” Wiggins said, adding that Armstrong also speaks regularly with his son, Ben. “He speaks to Ben a lot about me.”

Despite becoming Britain’s most decorated Olympian, being knighted in 2013, and earning a reported £13 million during his career, Wiggins’ personal life has been marked by deep trauma, family breakdown, and more recently, bankruptcy.

In June 2024, Wiggins was declared bankrupt at Lancaster County Court, and earlier this year admitted he had nowhere to live.

His marriage to Cath Wiggins, his long-time partner and mother of his two children, had broken down, and a subsequent relationship also ended.

The couple share two children: Ben, 19, a promising cyclist crowned junior world champion in the Madison, and Isabella, 18.

Despite Wiggins’ public scandals and personal struggles, both children and his ex-wife have been by his side.

“There were some really extreme moments,” Wiggins said on The High Performance Podcast. “Probably the last one was about a year ago… I was in a very dark place in a very dark room for many days… it was a hotel, and my son actually was the one who kind of intervened and made me realise, recognise the self-destructive mode I was in.”

Cath said previously: “I've no doubt whatsoever in his integrity as an athlete, none whatsoever. Nor did the children. They never once doubted their dad.”

Wiggins has spoken openly in recent years about being sexually abused as a teenager by his coach at the Archer Road Club, Stan Knight, who is now deceased.

He was also raised largely without his father, Gary Wiggins, an alcoholic and abusive former cyclist who walked out when Bradley was just 18 months old.

Though the two reconciled briefly in adulthood, Gary was later found dead under suspicious circumstances in Australia in 2008.