Bradley Wiggins reveals Lance Armstrong is paying for his therapy amidst bankruptcy nightmare: "He did what he did, but he's got a heart under there somewhere"

A former Tour de France winner and multiple time Olympic gold medallist, Sir Bradley Wiggins has hit a rough patch financially over recent years, with the most recent assessment of the bankruptcy claim against him being just short of £2 million. Through this nightmare though, support has come from a somewhat unlikely place in the form of cycling's persona-non-grata, Lance Armstrong. 

Once the biggest icon in cycling, Armstrong's fall from grace after doping admissions are well documented, but over recent years, the American and Wiggins have become close. So close in fact, that Armstrong has long been pushing Wiggins to go to therapy in an attempt to deal with his issues, built around abuse he suffered as a youth. After pushing back and pushing back against the idea, the 2012 Maillot Jaune winner has now finally decided to try therapy for the first time, with Armstrong paying the entire fee as a gesture of goodwill.

"Lance, he's helped me a lot in recent years - more so this year. We were talking about therapy, he wants to pay for me to go to this big place in Atlanta, where you go and stay for a week," explains Wiggins on the High Performance Podcast. "He's a good man. He did what he did, that's not to condone what he did. He's got a heart under there somewhere.”

It couldn't have come at a more needed time for the Brit either. As his long-standing mental health struggles combined with his financial issues over the last couple of years, Wiggins has found himself in a very dark place at times. "There were some really extreme moments. Probably the last one was about a year ago without going into too much detail," he recalls. "I was in a very dark place in a very dark room for many days, and 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. There were a lot of reasons for that. There was always something that was causing me issues and giving me a reason to not be happy and there was always something on the horizon. But I've realised now that there's never going to be a clear path. I realise we're born into a struggle and it's what you make with that struggle, this life. I refused to accept therapy. I was like 'no therapist is ever going to be educated enough to understand what's going on in my head'."

Thanks to the support of his family and friends, Wiggins is now back on the right path and in a positive frame of mind. "I'm honestly in the best place that I have been for 44 years of my life. And that's largely down to the fact that I've been to the arse end of the world and I've been in dark places at times for various reasons," he explains. "I always blamed the success, but I realise now it was multi-factual and there were many other things that contributed to that, and I've spent the last five years sorting that out in my head. I finally took responsibility for my own life and I'm not in a sort of position now where I'm playing the blame game."