Armstrong and Wiggins' ‘98 days in yellow' post captures cycling's unlikeliest friendship, and the limits of erasure

Lance Armstrong posted a photograph with Sir Bradley Wiggins and George Hincapie on Instagram on Thursday, July 16, during the second week of the Tour de France.

"98 days in yellow 🦁," Armstrong wrote. He offered no further explanation, but the arithmetic is not hard to reconstruct. Armstrong spent 83 days in the yellow jersey across the seven Tours he won between 1999 and 2005, before those results were struck from the record in 2012. Wiggins led the 2012 Tour for 14 days, from stage 7 to the finish in Paris. Hincapie wore yellow for a single day in 2006, taken through an intermediate sprint bonus a year after Armstrong's retirement.

That makes 98. The total only works, of course, by counting the 83 days that no longer exist in the official record, erased along with Armstrong's seven titles after the US Anti-Doping Agency's 2012 investigation.

The presence of Hincapie, Armstrong's loyal lieutenant across all seven of those Tours, is no surprise. The presence of Wiggins, given the history, is more striking.

'I thought, you lying bastard'

Wiggins grew up an Armstrong fan. He has described watching the American win the 1993 World Championships as a 13-year-old, and called the 1999 comeback victory inspirational for a 19-year-old on the British track programme.

The relationship curdled in 2009, when Armstrong returned to the Tour and edged Wiggins off the podium by finishing third, with the Briton fourth. When Armstrong confessed to doping in his January 2013 interview with Oprah Winfrey, while continuing to insist his 2009-10 comeback was clean, Wiggins was scathing.

"That was the thing that upset me the most about 2009 and 2010. I thought, you lying bastard," Wiggins said at the time. "The man I saw at the top of Verbier in 2009 to the man I saw on the top of Ventoux two weeks later, it wasn't the same bike rider. I just don't believe anything that comes out of his mouth anymore."

He also told the BBC that Armstrong had "certainly robbed me of maybe third place in the Tour de France and standing on that podium", and admitted to feeling "a bit smug" watching the confession as the reigning, clean Tour champion.

Wiggins' thaw was gradual and public. By 2018 Wiggins was arguing Armstrong had been "singled out" and that he saw the "human side" of him, and included the Texan in his book Icons, a decision that drew sharp criticism at the time.

During the 2024 Tour, Wiggins joined Armstrong's podcast The Move as a guest in Aspen, appearing alongside Armstrong and Hincapie in the wake of his highly publicized bankruptcy. In the months that followed, Wiggins would begin speaking openly about his post-retirement cocaine addiction, crediting Armstrong with supporting his recovery and even offering to fund residential therapy.

In a BBC interview in June 2025, Wiggins went further. "He's been a great strength to me and a great inspiration to me, and it's on a human level," he said. "Lance has been very, very good to me. That's not something everyone wants to hear because people only like to hear the bad stuff." Asked how often the two spoke, Wiggins replied: "I won't say every day, but I work for him."

The photograph is the latest image of that working friendship, but its caption is not an isolated reference to the altered historical Tour record. Four days earlier on The Move, in a discussion Wiggins was co-hosting, Armstrong insisted Tadej Pogačar would ride on beyond a fifth Tour victory because 'he knows what the record is', treating his own annulled total of seven as the benchmark that matters.

Twice in one week, then, Armstrong has publicly counted results the sport formally deleted, and both times Wiggins has been beside him. It is a small illustration of the limits of erasure. Striking a record changes what is official, but it has not changed what Armstrong claims, and it no longer appears to trouble the rider who once said those same results cost him a place on the podium.

Cover image credit: Simon Wilkinson/SWpix.com