He has made us feel like a nation of winners (for once)

THE sweetest moment of my week in Bradley Wiggins’s glorious slipstream (as I reported his triumphant roll through France) happened when an Australian reporter shamelessly tried to claim him as a compatriot.

This was on the tenuous premise that the cyclist’s father, who abandoned him as a child, was from Down Under.

Nice try, but Wiggins firmly disabused his inquisitor, pointing out – as if it were necessary given his Home Counties accent and mod hairstyle – that he had been raised in London by his English mother, Linda, and was therefore ‘very much British’.

Those thousands of fans who waved their Union Flags and sang God Save The Queen on the Champs Elysees yesterday had never for a moment doubted it, but the mere fact that the question was posed underlines the enormity of the English dynamo’s achievement.

For as we know, the Aussies, along with our other sporting nemeses, the Germans and Argentines, would ordinarily never stoop to embrace an Englishman as one of their own.

But Wiggins isn’t just any winner. According to quadruple Olympic gold medallist Sir Chris Hoy, until yesterday the most celebrated of the blazing saddle Brits who dominate world cycling, his victory is ‘ the greatest achievement by any British sportsperson – ever’. Having glimpsed the tortured look in his eyes at close quarters this week as he grasped for a water bottle after dragging himself to the peak of a 6,000ft mountain – one of four mountains he would scale that day alone – I wholly agree. Remembering our 1966 World Cup heroes, perhaps, or the gargantuan Olympian feats of Daley Thompson and Steve Redgrave; or Ian Botham singlehandedly smashing the Australians to the least likely Test defeat of modern times at Headingley in 1981; others will doubtless take a different view. What about Roger Bannister tearing around a cinder-track in Oxford 58 years ago to crack the ‘ insurmountable’ fourminute mile barrier?

In reality, though, it hardly matters whether or not Wiggins bestrides this pantheon.

After enduring yet another year of hurt thanks to a failing England football team and the perennial Wimbledon agony of Andy Murray, it is wonderful enough to be celebrating a momentous British sporting triumph.

And with the Olympics just four days away, Wiggins’s victory couldn’t have been timelier.

Not only should it inspire the entire British team to believe they can fulfil and even exceed their potential, but it ought to transform the national psyche, proving that we are not a nation of also-rans.

It is also a reminder that despite our unrequited love affair with the pampered, overpaid ‘stars’ of soccer, there are many other sports out there – and that we are actually rather good at a lot of them.

So good, in fact, that the bookmakers have made us favourites to take most Olympic gold medals after mighty China and the United States.

FOR a nation of 60million we have always punched well above our weight at boxing; our female swimmers hold three world records, and we are world champions in both the men’s and women’s triathlon.

As this week’s Open golf tournament began, we boasted the world’s top three golfers in Luke Donald, Rory Mcilroy and Lee Westwood; we also have two recent Formula One champions in Lewis Hamilton and Jenson Button.

Then there is our cricket team, which retains the world’s number one Test ranking despite the pummelling dished out by South Africa’s batsmen and bowlers yesterday. One could go on. The point is that, painful as it might be to watch Wayne Rooney and his ilk being outclassed by superior foreign players, there is an abundance of genuinely world- class British sporting talent out there, and it is high time we embraced it.

For today’s couch-potato generation, who prefer computer games to the outdoors variety (and have nowhere to kick a ball around because so many playing fields have been sold off), the stars of these so- called ‘ minor sports’ would certainly make more appropriate role models – and none more so than Bradley Wiggins.

Here, after all, is a man who inner-city children can truly relate to. He had a difficult start in life, was disinterested in school, and admits he came dangerously close to going off the rails.

Instead, he got on his bike, spent countless lonely, gruelling hours developing the supreme fitness and iron willpower required to win the world’s toughest race, and pedalled his way into the history books. Norman ‘Get on your bike’ Tebbit would doubtless approve.

Added to that, Wiggins is bright enough to speak fluent French, polite enough to have been dubbed Le Gentleman by the Gallic media, warm, witty ( he is a brilliant mimic) and utterly devoted to his wife and two children.

Wiggins is 32 and won’t be able to keep scaling mountains for ever, but he has earned more than £1million from Team Sky for cycling through 2,000 miles of French countryside these past three weeks, and this is surely just the beginning.

For as he stood on the podium yesterday, the wonderful Wiggins made us feel like a nation of winners at last.