WHEN Sir Bradley Wiggins announced his intention to leave Team Sky at the start of the year, team principal Sir Dave Brailsford hailed him as “one of the most versatile athletes the sport has ever seen.”

Come this summer’s Tour de Yorkshire, the wisdom of Brailsford’s words will be clear to see. Cycling superstar, visionary team promoter, British sporting icon – Wiggins will be all of these things and more as he acts as the poster boy for his sport’s new flagship event.

With his successful five-year association with Team Sky due to come to an end in the next month, the 34-year-old, who created history as the first British rider to win the Tour de France, will line up at the Tour de Yorkshire start in Bridlington on May 1 in colours he has never worn before.

He has formed a new team, WIGGINS, ostensibly with the intention of ensuring he can adequately prepare for the team pursuit at next summer’s Olympic Games in Rio, an event he hopes will provide a successful culmination to his career, but also with the express intention of helping to develop a new generation of British track and road riders.

Sponsored by Sky, and boasting former professional Simon Cope as team principal, WIGGINS has received a continental licence from the UCI, with its founder also receiving special dispensation from the cycling authorities to enable him to switch across to spearhead a maiden outing on the roads of Yorkshire.

The team joins five other British outfits at continental level, but given the profile and ability of its trailblazer, it is safe to assume it will receive rather more publicity than any of its rivals. Given that he is hardly a shrinking violet when it comes to lapping up the limelight, you suspect Wiggins would not have things any other way.

“The ultimate goal is winning the team pursuit in Rio,” said Wiggins. “So this is to facilitate everything we need for the track programme. The team is track-based and we have got a lot of the guys from the track programme in there so that we can stay and race and train together all year round.

“We can get exactly what we need in terms of achieving the end goal, which is winning the team pursuit in Rio.

“But cycling has given me everything, and now I want to build something to inspire kids and to reach all those people who might be on the fringes of the sport. We’ve seen cycling grow in popularity over the years and I want WIGGINS to inspire a new generation of cyclists.”

Wiggins has been joined in his new team by fellow team pursuiters Andy Tennant, Owain Doull, Jon Dibben, Mark Christian and the London gold medallist Steven Burke, as well as Daniel Patten, who raced in the US in 2014, Olympic academy rider Michael Thompson and GB mountain bike academy rider Ian Paton.

Throughout the Tour de Yorkshire, it will be Wiggins himself, however, who is the focus of attention, with the last two years having represented something of an unexpected struggle for a rider who had grown accustomed to unprecedented levels of success.

Having enjoyed a golden 2012 that saw him add the Olympic time trial title to the Tour de France crown, not to mention the small matter of the BBC Sports Personality of the Year award, Wiggins failed to finish the 2013 Giro D’Italia, which was his stated target for the season, and was unable to defend his Tour title after suffering a knee injury.

Last year proved even more disappointing, with Team Sky overlooking him entirely as they assembled their Tour de France team despite the race starting with Yorkshire’s Grand Depart.

While the likes of Chris Froome and Mark Cavendish were cheered to the rafters as they set off from Harewood House, Wiggins was an anonymous presence in the background, publicly insisting he held no grudges against his Team Sky bosses, but surely privately seething at such a blatant snub.

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He returned to the track to win a silver medal in the 4,000m team pursuit at the Commonwealth Games, but even that was something of a tarnished achievement as England’s defeat to Australia in the final underlined just how much improvement is needed ahead of Rio.

His appearance on the Yorkshire roads is an opportunity to start making that improvement in a competitive environment, but it also gives Wiggins the chance to soak up some of the adulation he was denied last year.

With no Froome or Cavendish to command national attention, Wiggins is the undisputed star of the show, and for all that his compatriots have achieved, that is surely only fair given the enormity of his achievement three summers ago.

“Two years have passed since I won the Tour, and I’ve just about started to accept what happened to me in 2012,” said Wiggins, who is also planning an assault on cycling’s legendary one-hour record later this year, in a recent interview with Velo magazine. “I’m much more comfortable with being a Tour winner than I was.

“I think that reflects in my behaviour and the way I am with everything. I’m just proud to have won the Tour de France now.”

Wiggins is also proud to have been the flag-bearer for a new generation of Team Sky cyclists who have attempted to draw a line under their sport’s tainted past and prove it is possible to make it to the very top while still being clean.

While rival teams might continue to snipe about Team Sky’s assertion that they are 100 per cent drug-free, Wiggins continues to champion his former team’s zero-tolerance policy, something he has vowed to maintain in WIGGINS.

And while there will always be the temptation to return for one more Tour de France, his love affair with the race has been damaged, something that has worked in the inaugural Tour de Yorkshire’s favour.

“On an individual, personal level, I will always be proud to have won the Tour de France, and the way I did,” he said. “But, in Europe, the vibe around the Tour de France has a lot of negativity at the moment.

“There’s always the question, ‘How can we believe in the winner?’, and I don’t like that about the race. I don’t like that it has become that.”