Bradley Wiggins has checked into one of America's leading trauma rehabilitation clinics - with controversial former cyclist Lance Armstrong taking on the bill.

Wiggins has been open about his struggles with his mental health in recent years, admitting he had become a 'functioning addict' and had been doing 's***loads of cocaine' - including snorting the drug off an Olympic gold medal.

He said during a talk at the Barbican in York on Wednesday: 'I still speak to him (Armstrong) and see him.

'I'm off to America on Friday. He's paid for me to go and see a top trauma counselling clinic in Utah so I'm looking forward to that.'

He added: 'He's offered me a role back in cycling, a platform which doesn't involve me getting on a bike.'

The duo have been good friends since their cycling days, with their careers overlapping until Armstrong retired in 2011.

Armstrong was later found to have committed a number of doping violations in his career and was stripped of various titles, including all seven of his Tour de France wins. 

Wiggins, meanwhile, has struggled since his own retirement in 2012 with the likes of money troubles, addiction and allegedly being groomed as a child, but is now on the mend.

He told The Times that he lived in a hotel for two weeks taking cocaine, potentially as much as 120 grams, and responded when asked how he didn't die: 'I don't know. I don't like to think about it.

'I raged as I smashed up my 2012 trophy for Sports Personality of the Year and my knighthood,' he added. '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 p***ing on someone's grave, and in that moment I was p***ing 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.'

Armstrong hired Wiggins to work on his podcast last year, covering the Tour de France.

Wiggins said of his friend in June: 'Lance has been a source of inspiration to me and a constant source of help.

'He is one of the main factors why I'm in this position I am today, mentally and physically, so, I'm indebted to him.'