Terrific Tony takes Time Trial triumph.

Alliteration. That is all.

Here’s an interesting fact for you: if Tony Martin had competed on his own in the World Team Time Trial Championships, he would have finished sixth. Sixth! One man on his own would have been faster than most of the six man teams competing in the competition. Just to outline how incredible this guy is if you can’t already see it, he would have finished 10 minutes ahead of the last placed team Velo Club Sovac. 10 minutes. 600 seconds.  So here’s a list of things you could do in the time after Tony Martin has finished, and whilst waiting for Velo Club Sovac: Do a Sudoku; listen to just under half of ‘Echoes’ by Pink Floyd; clean your teeth 5 times; run about 2 miles; or just sit, watch, and laugh as one lone German manages to absolutely destroy some of the best teams in cycling. Wow.

As you can probably tell, the winner of this year’s individual time trial was Bradely Wigg- what? You mean all the hype and expectation placed on a British athlete by the British media for once didn’t result in British success? That almost never happens, particularly when it comes to football, I don’t know what to say really…

So the winner was of course Mr Tony Martin who, just for a change, pulls on the rainbow Time Trial jersey for the third year in succession. Now, normally I would insist that this is becoming boring and predictable, and petition for him to be taken out of the sport for being too dominant or something stupid like that, but I like Tony. There are a couple of reasons for this: firstly, it’s hard not to be amazed by the utter stupidity of what this guy can do. Bradley Wiggins is a world class time-trialist, winning gold in London and standing head and shoulders above most of the rest of the field (perhaps exclude Fabian Cancellara), but Herr Martin beat him by 46 seconds. Here’s a list of wh- no, that wasn’t clever in the first place. But you get my point, he’s an absolute machine.

The second reason I find myself not despising him for being too good is that most of the time he’s riding with an injury or some flesh wound that would stop us mere mortals from competing. For example, he crashed quite badly early on in this year’s TdF, but still managed to finish, with the added of bonus of, erm, winning the first individual time trial. He also seems to be very unlucky in the grand tours (if you exclude the stage wins), getting mechanical faults at horrendously bad times, and crashing more often than Pastor Maldonado… It’s difficult not to be happy at this guy’s success, but we don’t want you winning four years in a row now do we? Take one for the team and fall off next year please.

Unfortunately it wasn’t to be for Brad, who, to be fair to him, recognised that he was just beaten by the better man. Nobody in the world could have come close to that time, and you just have to take your hat off to the German in this instance. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer country.

So attention now switches to Sunday’s road race, where the Kenyan-born Brit carries the weight of expectation on those ever so skinny shoulders. Spoiler alert: he won’t win. There isn’t enough up and down stuff, and the British team will be competing against pretty much the rest of the peloton, who all seem to want to deny a British victory. That said, I look forward to be proven wrong.

Just a quick note: I managed to get to the end of that without using the words doping or erythropoietin. It’s not difficult. Just trust that some people are better than others, and that they don’t rely on drugs to ensure success. That’s so 1990s…