Faced with mental health problems and financial difficulties, Bradley Wiggins recounts in a podcast how Lance Armstrong has mobilized in recent years to support him.
He expected everything except this outstretched hand. Facing very serious financial difficulties for several years, to the point of having found himself homeless for a while, Bradley Wiggins recounted in a long interview given for the podcast “The High Performance” that he received help from… Lance Armstrong .
The same one he had set on fire ten years earlier after seeing him, on television, confess, admitting to having doped for most of his career. “It's very difficult. I had to explain to my son what it was about. In the end, I told myself that he deserved everything that was happening to him now, without any sympathy in front of his tears and his tears”, Wiggins reacted at the time, while Armstrong had just admitted on the set of Oprah Winfrey to having cheated from the mid-1990s until 2005, during his seven Tours of France victorious.
“Lance helped me a lot”
Himself winner of the 2012 Tour, the Briton today believes that the Texan has “a heart deep inside him”. And for good reason, the former US Postal and Discovery Channel runner has decided to play the good Samaritan with Wiggins, who became a consultant after his career, who is trying to extricate himself from a personal situation that is delicate to say the least, between debts to pay off, mental health issues and old alcohol-related demons.
“Lance has helped me a lot over the years and even more so this year,” Wiggins reveals in “The High Performance.” “He wants to pay me to stay in a specialized center in Atlanta. You stay there for a week and they confiscate your phone. Lance is a good man. And I'm not saying that to excuse what he did, we we all know. But (what he suffered) is a little disproportionate to what some people do in this world,” he confides. During this interview, Wiggins also looks back on the most traumatic episode of his life, when he was “sexually abused for three years” by his first coach, as a teenager.
“When I retired, I started to hate cycling because I blamed the sport for my meeting with this man. It took me five years to accept it. I understood now that there will never be a clear path (…) I have sorted myself out in my mind. I have finally taken responsibility for my own life and I think that my best years are still to come. “, supports Wiggins, who first thought of refusing any help from Armstrong before finally changing his mind.
