Chris Froome gave a classy acceptance speech after winning his third Tour de France in Paris, dedicating his win to his son, Kellan.
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“Vive le Tour et vive la France”, said Froome.
Australian Chloe Hosking had earlier won the women’s La Course by Tour de France, the annual curtain-rasier to the final men’s stage.
At the start of the stage, Froome dropped back to his Team Sky auto to collect bottles of beer and distributed them to each of his eight teammates for a celebratory round.
The 31-year-old Kenyan-born Briton, who cruised to a third Tour de France crown in Paris on Sunday, broke a bone in his foot in last year’s Vuelta attempting to repeat Sastre’s feat.
Froome is there after once more taking his body to an extraordinary level during the past three weeks.
Greipel edged world champion Peter Sagan of Slovakia at the line in a sprint finish.
Tom Dumoulin, the favourite for gold in the Rio time trial, broke his arm in a crash on Stage 19 of the Tour, though the Dutchman is still hoping to compete in Brazil.
Once Froome took yellow on stage eight, there was rarely a moment he looked in danger – and when he did it was down to crashes on Mont Ventoux and on the approach to Saint-Gervais Mont Blanc rather than the actions of others.
Finally there was a groundbreaking performance from Adam Yates, who will also head to Rio, as he became the first British rider to win the white jersey for the best young rider.
For the second year in a row, Cummings snatched a stage win with a dramatic acceleration on the final climb of a medium-mountain stage, demonstrating a combination of strength and tactical cunning.
Rafal Majka of Poland won the king of the mountains jersey for the second time in three years but his only competition came from Belgian Thomas De Gendt, who is not even a climber. It’s a British success story, I would like to think, and the team was flawless.
“It’s probably harder for him this time, having to travel out to a completely different continent”, Wiggins said at a Team GB press conference.
Yet it is an indication of just how far British cycling has progressed in the last decade that the jury remains out on whether Froome’s latest success makes him the UK’s greatest bike rider because there are now so many candidates.
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Wiggins has sympathy with any clean Russian athletes denied a spot because, at the 2007 Tour de France, he never made it to Paris because his Cofidis teammate Christian Moreni failed a drugs test. “I’ve really done a lot in terms of offering up my physiological data and trying to be open to people as much as I can while protecting a competitive advantage at the same time”.
