The Best of The Best

While watching the tail end of the boxing this afternoon, I realise that the men's cycling Time Trial must be approaching its conclusion.  One weakness in this games is how hard it is to see one sport while at another's venue, and there was no television or screen in the ExCel centre to gather around and give some national support.  I think I imagined that the Olympic park, and smaller venues, might have small televisions showing footage from all manner of other events.  It would have lent the games more of a unified atmosphere, more of a single festival of sport than a series of independent events.

No Englishman, as you may have heard, had ever won the Tour de France. This Summer, Bradley Wiggins did that. Nobody of any nationality has ever won an Olympic track cycling gold medal, and gone on to win the Tour de France. This Summer, he did that too. Then, for an encore, Bradley Wiggins rode the cyclist's 'race of truth' – the Time Trial – and became the only man in history to win the Tour De France and Olympic gold in the same year.

The Tour is something you leave halfway through if you want to chase Olympic glory, conventional wisdom says. A normal human body cannot ride for 2,200 miles, then two weeks later sustain speeds of 35mph for 28 miles. Bradley Wiggins is certainly not a normal human. He hardly seems human at all. The pre-race favourite today, Fabian Cancellara, had flown out of the French race as soon as the Tour hit serious climbs. Wiggins stayed on the climbs. He won out on the climbs. He came home and in the finest lap of honour any sportsman could take, circled this corner of his home city in front of a vast adoring crowd before his final curtain call on the podium.

This would be an incredible racing career if Wiggins were French, or Spanish, Italian, Belgian or even American. That he was able to achieve it as a member of the first generation of British cyclists ever to matter on any stage outside of the track and occasional prologues is nothing short of unbelievable. Like Boardman and those before him, he conquered that, but then he mastered the road for an encore, as if it were the logical progression rather than a staggering, unprecedented achievement.

Arise Sir Bradley, cries the nation as one. I'd like to see the great man given the chance to finish his astonishing career without that label, but the day he hangs up his riding shoes is the day he can write himself whatever title he chooses.