The first people Sir Bradley Wiggins bumped into when he stepped off the track having become Britain’s most decorated Olympian were Sir Steve Redgrave and Sir Chris Hoy, who he had just joined in the very upper echelon of domestic sporting greats.
“They’re my heroes in Olympic sport and just to be in the same breath as those guys is an honour really,” said a breathless Wiggins, having just notched up his eighth medal, five of them gold.
“It was more about personally what it meant to me.”
While his friends had pictures of footballers on their walls, Wiggins grew up in Kilburn watching Chris Boardman winning gold in Barcelona and dreaming of bike races and Olympic medals.
On a giddy night in a Rio Velodrome almost as full of raucous support as London four years previously, he added another gold to his tally to become Britain’s most decorated Olympian.
Having set a new world record to reach the final, Wiggins and the rest of his team pursuit quartet – Ed Clancy (who won his third straight gold in the event), Steven Burke (who won his second) and Owain Doull (his first) – then smashed it again to overcome Australia in a nailbiting final amid rolling waves of noise.
Redgrave was the first to pay tribute to his longevity. “It’s incredible,” he said. “I never thought about it when I was competing. You just think about it when it’s over.
“What Bradley has done is so much more. His character, his enthusiasm, his way of doing things a little bit differently rubs off on people.”
It was appropriate that Wiggins’s eighth medal came in the very same event, the men’s team pursuit, in which he won his first – a bronze – at the Sydney Games 16 years ago.
In another dramatic moment of a stellar career, the man who helped define a golden era for British cycling secured his eighth medal across five Olympics, pulling clear in numerical terms of a roll call of domestic sporting greats including Hoy, Redgrave and Sir Ben Ainslie.
If moments matter more than weight of medals then Mo Farah, Rebecca Adlington, Dame Kelly Holmes, Nicola Adams, Jessica Ennis-Hill, Daley Thompson, Sebastian Coe and many others also merit a mention.
But if sporting greatness can be measured in precious metal alone then Wiggins, who four years ago became the first British man to win the Tour de France during a quite incredible sporting summer, now stands alone.
Not that he was having any of it. “Chris has got six, so I haven’t surpassed Chris. Who counts bronzes and silvers when you’ve got five golds? Five is a nice number. I remember seeing Steve [Redgrave] in Sydney and he was such an inspiration to me. They are my two heroes in Olympic sport really.”
Appropriately for such a distinctive individual, the achievement deserves to stand alone.
Along with Hoy (who has six golds and one silver), Wiggins came to define a period of unprecedented success for cycling in Britain and made the sport fashionable again; from kids buying their first bike to the middle-aged obsessives who now pack country roads.
But Wiggins has always had a complex relationship with fame, preferring to prioritise his sport over celebrity.
His Sports Personality of the Year award in 2012, when he combined Tour de France success with a sunlit day in Hampton Court on which it seemed he could do no wrong in winning gold in the time trial, felt like an attempt to draw a line under the madness that greeted his annus mirabilis.
As had happened at various times during a rollercoaster career, he appeared bereft without a target to aim for.
If money was no longer a concern, as it had been when he returned from the Athens Games and realised a gold medal would not pay the mortgage, he fretted that his fire had gone out.
After winning more medals in in Beijing, he switched to the road. And in 2013, characteristically, he eyed a new challenge.
Supplanted by Chris Froome as lead rider for Team Sky, he went back to the track and poured his energy instead into the Commonwealth Games in 2014, then targeting the hour record in 2015 in London on the Olympic Park.
The challenge of winning gold and claiming Hoy’s record in Rio appeared to inspire him anew and he has poured everything into leading his trio of teammates to a golden denouement.
“We got annihilated in the Commonwealth Games final two years ago,” he said. “I realised what it took and never underestimated it for one minute.
“I came back, gave up the road, gave up the big salary and was just a number again. And here we are. I wanted to go out like this. I wanted it to end like this.”
There will be a handful of other races before the end of the year, the Tour of Britain and the Ghent Six Day. And then that, he insisted, would be that.
