British decathlete Daley Thompson had won gold at the 1984 Los Angeles Games when he began whistling to “God Save The Queen” after receiving his medal.
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They finished the 4km race nearly three seconds quicker than Australia, whom they will meet in the final later on Friday.
It was gold or nothing for this team.
The final result only told half the story, however, as the two teams played-out another chapter in one of sport’s most enduring rivalries.
“It is a burden and you live with it every day”.
Wiggins now has five golds, one silver and two bronzes to surpass fellow cyclist Sir Chris Hoy’s tally of seven.
Cavendish has described Wiggins as his “big brother” in cycling but the relationship between the pair hasn’t always been smooth sailing.
He was the first Briton to win the Tour de France, he holds the world hour record on the track, he was world and Olympic champion in the road time-trial, and he is a four-time Olympic champion on the track.
Wiggins had more success at the 2008 Beijing Games, winning gold in the team and individual pursuits, before turning his full attention to the more lucrative and glamorous world of road racing.
“The reality is we gave Mark the opportunity in Newport to come into the squad and he didn’t deliver”.
Great Britain’s team competes to set a new world record in the Men’s team pursuit first round at the Rio Olympic Velodrome during the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Friday, Aug. 12, 2016.
“It’ll be a nice end to my career, back where I was born, back where it started”, he said. I didn’t want to go into another four-year cycle.
Britain had set the previous record of 3min 51.659sec for the 4km race four years ago in winning Olympic gold in London, beating Australia in the final.
The respect is mutual, with Wiggins saying: “They [the Australians] are the reason we got out of bed in the morning, they motivated us”. It wasn’t until two laps to go that I even knew where the Aussies were. It’s gone now. Two years ago, all this press has been building up.
While Sam Taylor recovered from three match points down in the fifth set of the deciding rubber to send Team GB’s table tennis players into the quarter finals of the team event.
The 2012 champion came through on his final leap to secure qualification while Jessica Ennis-Hill leads the heptathlon after day one.
By kilometre 3 the lead was cut to 0.09 seconds and though the British side edged in front, there was late drama as their three finishing cyclists threatened to drift apart and give the Australians an opening.
There was talk from their training base in Wales they were going well, gossip on social media that they’d been setting world record times in training.
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Germany, Olympic champion in the discipline in 2012, beat Australia for bronze. However, in what might be construed as the kind of retaliatory swipe that seems to characterise the pair’s amusing bickering married couple schtik, Wiggins confirmed rumours that Cavendish had not been included in the team because he had not been good enough in training and was unable to keep up with the rest of the team.
