Bradley Wiggins: first the Tour, then the Olympics - 2012 was my year The moment when I walked in through the front door of the house, having just won the Tour de France, was emotional, and strange. It was the point when my wife Cath and I had to start dealing with it, and we were both a little stressed out. I was simultaneously trying to come to terms with the fact I'd just won the Tour de France and trying to get myself organised with only five days before the Olympic road race. There were things to sort out: have I got a bike here yet? Where was the one that had been dropped off last week? I'd won the Tour de France, but I felt as if I would be the last person to take it on board; it reminded me a little of how I felt when I won the Olympic pursuit for the first time in 2004. It's almost a kind of disbelief that this is happening; it's little things such as seeing the front page of l'Equipe with my picture on it in the yellow jersey. You don't realise it's you on there. And there are messages like the one I had from Sir Chris Hoy, who said he thought the Tour win was the greatest achievement ever in British sport: it's humbling to hear praise of that kind. The biggest accolade is respect from your peers, people I look up to. I'd insisted on going home. It was what I had wanted and looked forward to throughout the Tour, but in spite of all the thought we had put into it, being back in Lancashire wasn't quite what I expected. The very next day people started knocking on the door. That Monday morning, there were cars parked for half a mile down the road. We woke up to find a mass of press and other people outside, so it felt as if we were under siege. On my first day home, we went to Wigan. The photographers were all taking pictures of us as we drove out, which felt very strange: what were they all doing? What do they want? It was all bizarre, coming back four weeks later to what I'd left. All of a sudden a lot had changed. I had underestimated quite how big the whole thing would be. By the evening I was saying, "I've got to go out on my bike for an hour," so I went for a quick spin, but at first I couldn't get through the mass of people, and I had to give the journalists a few minutes. There was a line of cars following me as I rode, people taking photographs, people wanting me to sign things - some of them piles of pictures that they were going to sell on eBay, I suspect - and the next day, when I went out to the Co-op for a pint of milk and a loaf of bread, I was mobbed. The same thing happened when I took my son Ben to a rugby league training day. Cycling is a sport that levels people out. When you go on a club run, if you puncture you repair it yourself. You don't get someone else to do it for you. I still wash my own bike when I'm at home and it gets covered in shit - I did that the Monday after the Tour. I spent several years getting laughed at and called names when I was a kid wearing Lycra, which wasn't the thing to do in the 1990s. As cyclists, we become famous in our own little world, but we don't usually become celebrities. It all takes a bit of getting used to. During the week before the Olympics, Dave Brailsford from British Cycling rang me from the track team's holding camp in Newport and said: "Look, they want you to ring the bell at the Olympic opening ceremony. It's massive; you know you can't say no to it. I would, he told me, be on every television channel around the world. It was kept very, very quiet: no one else knew other than Dave and head coach Shane Sutton. Even now, looking back, I haven't quite figured out how big it was. That whole period was very surreal. It was one high after another; winning that time trial in Chartres, the next day the Champs-Elysées, drinking champagne in the Ritz, private-jetting home back to Lancashire, then down to Surrey in a helicopter. We had a taste of how big it all was when we went out training as a team before the Olympic road race, with people who were just going about their daily business saying: "Bloody hell, there go Great Britain." The support was massive in the villages around the team hotel, and on Box Hill there were people everywhere looking for a glimpse of us and all the others. You could feel the buzz. That Friday evening we drove across to east London; just being in the Olympic Village was incredible. I love that atmosphere, the feeling you get from being in the village with all the other athletes; I wasn't going to get it at this Games, as we were staying in Surrey, so this was my only chance to experience it. The minute I got inside, there were people coming up to me, athletes asking to have their photo taken with me. Dave came with me; I'd arranged to meet Chris Hoy to have dinner in there. I hugged Chris and we had our meal together, with all kinds of people looking at us. Chris was carrying the flag that night for Great Britain in the opening ceremony parade, and after he went off to join the team, Dave and I walked over to the stadium. So I stood backstage, wearing the yellow jersey that they gave me, with these things going over my ears and into my earholes; I was wired up in the way that bands are on arena tours, so they can hear the backing tracks. Someone said: "OK, Bradley, on in two seconds." They opened the door: "Go." I walked to the front of the stage, stopped at the cross marked on the floor; waved to the crowd. All I saw was a wall of flashing lights, because everyone was taking photos and I couldn't hear anything except the type of sound you have when you have earplugs in when you are going to sleep; all I could register was the sound of my breathing in my ears in the middle of this wall of flashlights: "All right, Bradley, turn around, go up to the bell, stand at the bell, and wait for your command to ring it." I rang the bell, walked down the steps and out of the stadium. Someone threw a jacket over me and I was whisked straight out; within two minutes I was in a private car with a police escort all round me, and we were going through the streets of London, uniformed motorcyclists stopping traffic all the way. I was on stage at two minutes past nine, and by half past I was back in the hotel at Hyde Park Corner with the Great Britain boys. As soon as I walked into the hotel, Rod - who is team manager for GB road teams as well as working at Team Sky - said to me: "Right, we've got a meeting in 10 minutes," so in no time I was changed into team kit to talk through the next day and work out how we were going to do everything we could to win the Olympic road race for Mark Cavendish. Then I had to go and shave my legs, pin my numbers on and go through all the pre-race routine for the next morning. Stuff that would have seemed completely bizarre to me, that you can't even dream about, was becoming the norm and it was all happening in a blur: nipping in and out of the stadium to be the opener at the Greatest Show on Earth and driving back with an escort that made me feel as if I was the president of the United States. Maybe in 20 years' time I'll look back and tell my grandchildren: "Oh yeah, the Olympic Games in London, I was there, I did the thing with the bell." It was fantastic to be asked. It was definitely special to play a part in some way. But I had no idea what public opinion was about what I'd done at the Tour. I hadn't been anywhere in public other than the Co-op in the village. I hadn't stood on a station platform, or been through an airport, or gone anywhere in the world outside the Tour, my home and the team hotel. I'd been in a bubble. That might explain what happened when I was waiting to go out into the stadium to ring the bell. When we got there, the volunteer at the entrance said: 'It's quite good in that stadium, you know. So I asked: "I'm not going to get booed or something, am I?" "Trust me," he said. No, you won't get booed. Right after that we were doing the road race, with the whole country expecting us to produce a gold medal in the first event of the Games. The minute that was done, my thoughts had to turn to the time trial. That time trial has to rate as my greatest Olympic moment, more than the pursuit final win against Brad McGee in Athens, and maybe even more than the team pursuit world record in the final in Beijing along with Geraint Thomas, Ed Clancy and Paul Manning. To win that gold medal in that setting, in London, in front of Hampton Court, with all the history going back to Henry VIII; it was about as British as you can get. The time trial lasted an hour, whereas the track races I'd done in the previous Olympics had been only four minutes long. There was so much time to savour it. Every athlete has a defining year during their career. Sir Chris Hoy's was 2008, when he won his three gold medals at Beijing, and 2012 is probably mine. I remember when I was a kid Chris Boardman talking about his hour record in Manchester in 1996; he reckoned nothing would ever top the feeling of going round that track to the roar of the crowd for one whole hour. For the best part of an hour that Wednesday in Surrey, I was able to savour that feeling, of being at my best, with a massive crowd deafening me with their support. I am not saying it is the end of my career by any means, but nothing is ever going to top that. And that's a poignant feeling. I don't know if it was better than the Tour de France. I still haven't come to terms with the fact that I have won the Tour, so at this stage I don't know. In my eyes, the Tour will always be phenomenal because of what the team did for me: the whole race, all 22 days of it, was about the team putting me in a position to win the Tour de France. After the Tour, I struggled to work out quite how to thank them. I didn't speak to any of the riders who helped me win the Tour, other than Cav, for a fair while, because I didn't know what to say to them. I didn't want to send them some cheesy email saying, "Guys, I can't thank you enough," because I don't think that was quite what was needed. It's got to come from the heart and not just in an email. What I do know is that I will never forget it. During the Games, there was speculation about whether I might end up with a knighthood in the same way that Sir Chris Hoy did after his great year. People asked me about it, so I did wonder whether I would accept it if it were to come my way. The point is that I can never see myself being given a title like Sir Bradley Wiggins. I have never considered myself above anybody else. I have always struggled with hierarchy and status. I don't know what it is - maybe just my upbringing, the area I'm from - but I'm quite happy to play second fiddle. I understand my physical capabilities sometimes give me status but, when it's all done and dusted, I struggle with that kind of thing. It's not what happens to kids from Kilburn. My late grandad George was the father figure, the role model in my young life, from the day when my mother Linda and I moved in to my nan and grandad's flat in Kilburn after my father Gary had walked out on us. After the Games, I remember saying to my nan: "So if I get offered a knighthood or whatever, what do you reckon George would make of it if I turned it down?" She came back, quick as a flash: "He would never have spoken to you again." So if it comes my way, I just might have to take it. © Bradley Wiggins 2012. Extracted from My Time by Bradley Wiggins, published by Yellow Jersey Press on 8 November. Bradley Wiggins - a Year in Yellow is on Sky Atlantic HD on Wednesday 21 November at 10pm.