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The quartet of Sir Bradley Wiggins, Edward Clancy, Steven Burke and Owain Doull claimed gold in the men’s team pursuit after beating Australia in a time of three minutes 50.265 seconds.
Adding team pursuit gold to his already impressive medal haul, Wiggins becomes the first Briton to win eight Olympic medals. By passing the likes of Sir Chris Hoy, Sir Steve Redgrave and Ben Ainslie, he becomes GB’s most decorated Olympian.
On the astonishing achievement Wiggins, said: “The first people I bumped into were Chris Hoy and Steve Redgrave, so just to be in the same breath as those guys is an honour.
“To be five Olympics on, to have five golds myself, I could never imagine that for one minute. That’s something to tell the kids about.”
The gold medallists in the past three Olympic Games started off their campaign in tremendous fashion. The Team GB cyclists set a new world record to reach the final before beating their new recently set world record in the final.
In the final Great Britain trailed Australia by 0.7 seconds at the halfway mark after an impressive start by the Australian quartet of Alexander Edmondson, Jack Bobridge, Michael Hepburn, and Sam Welford. Britain responded, getting back on level terms with their opponents and then pulling away in the final 500m to win by 0.83 seconds.
Sir Bradley Wiggins stated that the team would be only going for gold and nothing else because of them being reigning Olympic champions.
“Anything less than a gold will be a huge disappointment, the way we’re going at the moment,” said Team GB’s Sir Bradley Wiggins when he arrived in Rio.
After the win, Wiggins told BBC Sport: “It’s a relief. Eighteen months ago there were doubts about whether I could come back and do this.”
Denmark’s Norman Lasse Hansen, Niklas Larsen, Frederik Madsen and Casper Folsach Von took the bronze medal in a time of 3:53.789 beating New Zealand’s Pieter Bulling, Aaron Gate, Dylan Kennett and Regan Gough by three seconds.
