Bradley Wiggins: Has former Tour de France winner underachieved?

So when Wiggins finally tired of alternating between the very professional accumulation of track medals for Great Britain and the slightly amateurish attempts to convince French pro teams he could win road races too, Vaughters signed him for Garmin-Slipstream. That was September 2008.

Ten months later, a slimmed-down Wiggins was riding shoulder to shoulder with Alberto Contador, the Schleck brothers and Ferrari’s most famous pupil, Lance Armstrong, on the final climbs of the toughest stages at the 2009 Tour.

Wiggins would eventually finish fourth,, external matching Robert Millar’s best ever finish by a British rider (and it was later upgraded to third), only to actually go and win the thing when Armstrong was slung out of the sport in 2012.

He and Vaughters had parted company by then, somewhat acrimoniously, but the transfer fee the American extracted from Team Sky for Wiggins’ repatriation in 2010 was still subsidising Garmin’s racing programme, so the relationship was not completely over.

The point of this story is not just to titillate the Twittersphere with “a Ferrari fuelled Wiggo” anecdote, or to highlight Vaughters’ eye for a bargain, it is to point out that Wiggins leaves road cycling with a haul of titles that could be even more impressive if only he had realised just how good he was (or somebody else realised just how good he was) a few years earlier.

He was 29 when he made that Tour breakthrough – and there were other good results in 2009, too – but he struggled in his first year in Team Sky colours, in 2010, seemingly weighed down by the expectations that came with his new “contender” status and leadership role.

Which is why 2011 is arguably more significant than the near-perfect 2012 in his transition from popular Olympian to British cycling’s first superstar.