Wiggins: “It's the Tour man, it doesn't get much bigger than this!”

“From the moment you start cycling as a kid, it’s about this. You get into it and everyone dreams of winning the Tour or wearing the yellow jersey at the Tour but to cross the line... well, I kind of summed it up in that punch coming across the line. The last 10 or 15 kilometres, I was thinking of everything really: from my childhood to this point, the days I got into cycling as a kid: my family – my mother, my wife and children, my grandfather who died two years ago... and it was all for them really. It was an incredible feeling and it was spurring me on to go harder and harder and harder. Some people in sport say, ‘You’re in the zone.’ But I was in it today in a way that I’ve never been before.
“This is everything. It’s a lifestyle. And I’ve learned to live this lifestyle these last few years at the sacrifice of so many other things in my life, including the people around me who live with me and know me. This is as much because of their sacrifice and it’s huge.
“The British flags out there on the roadside... it’s bloody humbling. You just think, ‘Why me?’ in a way. Just seeing the happiness of everyone out there today was an incredible feeling.
“The reason I feel like this is because I have a sense of what I’ve achieved because I know my cycling and I can’t really sum it up in articulate terms. What happened out there is just incredible!

“This is what I ultimately do best: time trialling. It was a superb course and I just wanted to finish the job off in style. There was a lot of emotion in the last 10km there when I knew I was ahead. Everything was going through my mind, all the years of getting to this point... all the disappointments like crashing out of the Tour last year and watching Cadel in this very position in Grenoble; I always imagined what it would feel like and now I know what it felt like last year.
“It’s the Tour man, it doesn’t get much bigger than this!”