Wiggins turns wheel in Team GB's favour Bradley Wiggins had resolved the question of who should light the Olympic flame, said Peter Keen, UK Sport's performance director. He's already lit it. I can't think of a better thing to happen before Team GB takes the field of play," said Mr Keen. It is an audacious, outrageous level of achievement. Mr Keen's own career takes us back to the days before British cycling dared even contemplate the idea of a Tour de France winner. He coached Chris Boardman to a gold medal in the Barcelona Olympics of 1992. And laid the groundwork for the high performance cycling programme based at the Manchester velodrome, which Dave Brailsford, British Cycling's performance director, has taken on to such telling effect. It was here that Mr Brailsford coaxed and nurtured the likes of Sir Chris Hoy, Victoria Pendelton and the newly crowned Tour de France winner to world championship and Olympic glory. "It's a blend of science, business and passion," said Mr Keen. Without question, money has also helped. In the days of his Barcelona triumph, Boardman depended on a mixture of cash from benevolent sponsors and race winnings of a few hundred pounds. "I doubt the car he drove was fully road-legal," said Mr Keen. But lottery funding changed the dynamic for UK elite sport, giving Mr Brailsford a multiyear time period to develop training methods, which includes work with sports psychologists. Now, cycling is the second-best funded Olympic sport in the UK, behind rowing, but ahead of athletics and swimming. It received £26m in the four-year cycle to the London Olympics, plus £25m to develop grassroots participation. This investment paid off in spectacular fashion in Beijing four years ago when the UK won 14 Olympic cycling medals. Determined to build on Olympic glory, Mr Brailsford set out to create a British-led team to challenge for the Tour de France. This in turn would raise the standards of British cyclists competing for road race medals in the Olympics. BSkyB, the satellite broadcaster, gave Mr Brailsford's Tour de France project the funds he needed, in the form of a four-year sponsorship deal worth about £35m. It also backed the mass participation programmes of governing body British Cycling, which fitted Mr Brailsford's vision for a playground-to-podium culture. There are 700,000 more cyclists than in 2009. The crossover between Mr Brailsford's Team Sky and the British Cycling team is fundamental to the Tour de France success and why Team GB is confident of a strong cycling medal haul at the London Olympics. In other sports, such as football, tensions between club and country hinder the progress of the national team. In cycling, it is seen as a virtue to have a number of coaches and riders with dual contracts, such as Shane Sutton, head coach of both Team Sky and British Cycling. "Team Sky created a professional team built on the foundations of the British team," said Ian Drake, British Cycling's chief executive. At London, British cycling will not match its Beijing achievements. Rule changes have restricted the number of competitors a country can enter. But Mr Keen said the upper end of an official target of six to 10 British medals is within the team's grasp. It was meant to take five years to realise Dave Brailsford's ambition of a British rider winning the Tour de France. But as Bradley Wiggins milked the applause of Parisians on Sunday, the team principal of Team Sky, who set that target in 2010, sounded like a man who always knew it would come sooner. "I was very confident that the team would be in with a shout this year," the 47-year-old Welshman said en route to his riders" Champs Elysées victory parade. After the progression we made since last year, it was definitely do-able. Mr Brailsford, who had a short career in professional cycling before taking a degree in sports science and psychology, said the basis of that achievement is simple - talented athletes and a commitment to fulfil that talent. Underpinning that is a backroom staff working to achieve what he has called "the aggregation of marginal gains," a phrase that is becoming a mantra in the world of sports science. Or, as he put it another way: "You continue to go through the model of "plan, do, review" over and over again." The model is one that should be possible to replicate in any sport, he added. I don't think the sport of cycling has been in the DNA of this country to the extent that it is in northern European countries and Spain and Italy. But success is the key thing. It creates interest and emotion, and more people get involved in it. The rest is about capitalising on the success. "All in all," he said, "you can create idols and role models and allow cycling to build on that."