This is the greatest! Only a obnubilate associated with excellence because Wiggins trips in to historical past upon time associated with beauty

It was beautiful, so beautiful. It was brilliant, quite, quite brilliant. And it was British. Uniquely, insanely, just joyously British.
There are points of reference in our sporting  history — Steve Redgrave in a boat, Sebastian Coe on the track, but being a home Olympics, somehow this had more.
Do you know the film The Italian Job? It was like that.

There is a perfect moment when the heist has come off and the news has reached home shores. Its criminal mastermind, Mr Bridger, played with impeccable bearing by Noel Coward, walks from the plushly appointed cell to the acclaim of his fellow prison inmates. As one, they bang their metal mugs on the balcony, in a showing of national pride. Rat-tat, rat-tat-tat, rat-tat-tat-tat: England.

The same rhythm, the same sentiment echoed around the grounds of Hampton Court Palace yesterday, except this time it was all for one man. The crowd beat their tattoo on the boards lining the last leg of his route. Rat-tat, rat-tat-tat, rat-tat-tat-tat: Wiggins.
Bradley Wiggins had brought home, not the first gold medal for Great Britain at these Games, but almost certainly the most memorable. Whatever happens from here it will be hard to top this.

Here was a stunning display of strength, speed and endurance, a performance of pure domination, Wiggins the winner by a street, quite literally considering this was a road race. He would not look out of place in The Italian Job, either. Not with those sideburns.

He threw his head back on the podium and raised his arms in the air. His medal total now makes him the most decorated Olympian in British history.

We have already had one debate this summer about whether Wiggins is the greatest sportsman this country has produced; now there is sure to be another. This time, however, he has the facts to make the case, as much as individual opinions.

This was Wiggins’s fourth Olympic gold medal, to add to a silver and two bronze. No British athlete has won seven. Redgrave claimed six. The greatest? Increasingly, the tag is irresistible.

Fittingly, the medallists at Hampton Court Palace were given seats on purple and gold thrones. They were supposed to imply majesty, but looked more like a reminder of David Beckham’s wedding. They did not seem quite Wiggins’s style. Instead of resting, he set off back down the course to find his wife, Cath, and his family, passing the rows of spectators who had cheered him home. He had a lot of thank-yous to say.

Wiggins adores cycling, possesses a passion for it that has endured since childhood. To see his sport, so long at the margins, now at the heart of British life must fill his heart with joy. The feeling is mutual.

After so many near misses this week, so many stumbles and frustrations, yesterday’s gold medals were emphatic. This time Great Britain’s coach did not end up dangling over a cliff, the gold tantalisingly out of reach. It was not like the ending of that film at all.
Rowers Heather Stanning and Helen Glover had triumphed in fine style at Eton Dorney in the morning, and Wiggins won his 27.3-mile race by a quite incredible 42 seconds.

Time it. Look at your watch and let that hand tick past. Imagine if the riders had started together and you were standing at the finishing line waiting for silver medallist Tony Martin of Germany to come through. Some delay, isn’t it?

Banished are the thoughts that this could be an anti-climatic Olympics for Great Britain. If it is believed that one success inspires another, then Wiggins is the nation’s catalyst. Already a hero as the first winner of the Tour de France, his presence and better weather than predicted brought out some people who risked considerably more than a sportsman’s injury for the best vantage point on Hampton Court Road.
They clambered on to roofs and small balconies to cheer him down the final straight and he did not disappoint. It had already been announced to roars that Wiggins had closed the physical gap on Martin — not his time differential, which was already well inside — to 800 metres and he was fast approaching.
Martin came through, better than Chris Froome’s time to take silver, at worst. Then, almost immediately, Wiggins arrived. Legs pumping, body perfectly still, a slim frame on a slim frame.

Impossibly fast, given the screaming resistance a time-trialist will feel from every muscle by this stage in the race, he was a blur of Olympic perfection.

If the Queen has time to go parachuting with James Bond, she could have done worse than to drop in here at that moment, sword at the ready. Arise Sir Bradley? Why even wait? How comfortably that inevitability will sit with a chap who was more thrilled to get a congratulatory text from Smiths guitarist Johnny Marr than a royal blessing when he won the Tour de France, it is hard to say.

Wiggins still goes out with a target on the front of his cycling helmet, a nod to his status as King of the Mods. It is part of his charm, a British fixation that few beyond these shores will understand. How to explain to a European disciple of road cycling that your other bike is a Vespa? Not that he could go much faster on one, mind you.

Watching him, it is possible to forget that only last Saturday he remained at the front of a strength-sapping peloton to try to get his team-mate Mark Cavendish a medal in the road race, or that he had spent his summer traversing France as Europe’s most successful cyclist.

‘We’ve not seen the best of him yet,’ said Sean Yates, one of his coaches, but how can that be? What can he do to out-strip the pure emotion of yesterday? Even Wiggins seemed confused.
‘I don’t think my sporting career will ever top this now,’ he said. ‘That’s it. It will never, ever get better. Incredible. It had to be gold today or nothing. What’s the point of seven medals if they’re not the right colour? So, mainly it’s about the four golds.’ And then, without missing a beat: ‘Now I have to go to Rio and go for five.’
That is what it is like, being Britain’s greatest Olympian, that is what drives a man: an insatiable thirst, a quite incomprehensible desire to achieve, and keep achieving, no matter how much it hurts.

For never forget that it hurts. It hurts a lot. It may look like fun, it may be a moment we think we all share, but only one of us has broken the pain barrier to cross that line. And do it again. And again. And one more time. And then some more. And keep doing it until he has flown past the markers set by every competitor in British Olympic history. By every citizen of these isles. And certainly, as King of the Mods, by any bloody Teddy Boy.


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Article Source:http://www.skysportzone.com/–This is the greatest! Only a obnubilate associated with excellence because Wiggins trips in to historical past upon time associated with beauty