Bradley Wiggins

There are any number of reasons for liking individual sports but one of them is that they force you to look harder and  know yourself better. After all it you control your own performance and you know if you have succeeded or if you have let yourself down.

It is the same at every level and applies just as much to me plodding along, trying to keep going, as it does to someone competing at the Olympics. There might be the world of difference in ability and ambition but each of us has a framework of what we expect. 

As I have said many times before an essential virtue of running is its honesty. The times do no lie and you cannot pretend to be faster than your actual results. However there can be a difference between a clear assessment in private and what you are prepared to admit publicly (all of us have some sort of image we like to maintain).

That is why I love it when you find sportsmen who will talk openly - I find them inspiring. 

This interview with Bradley Wiggins is a case in point. I admire a man who can own up to the failure of his 2010 Tour de France and  not try to coat it with stock excuses or phrases from the sport psychologists cookbook. He obviously likes to be grounded as shown by the assessment that his Sky team got too pompous last year and that he "ended up up my own arse a little – and it was so far from the truth it was unreal."

He seems to have realised that you can become overly professional, overly focussed, overly constrained and as a result lose your way a little.

"Widening the focus will help. I remember coming back from the national road race in 2009 and, a week before the Tour, we stopped at a service station. I had a pizza and a couple of beers. This year I wouldn't have a little glass of wine in case it ruined my Tour. But a more relaxed Brad, after a glass of wine, would've had a much better Tour. When you look back it seems so simple and you think: 'What a dick!' I've learned my lesson."

I will be cheering for him on next year's tour.