Sir Bradley Wiggins' top-five Team Sky moments

Sir Bradley Wiggins’ five and a half years with Team Sky have delivered an almost constant stream of success.

Ahead of his final race for the British squad, at Paris-Roubaix on Sunday, we look back at his top-five moments in chronological order...

2011: Criterium du Dauphine triumph

The Criterium du Dauphine is the most important warm-up race for the Tour de France, so Wiggins’ victory in the 2011 edition represented a significant step on the way to winning the Tour a year later. It was his first stage-race victory for Team Sky and he also comfortably defeated Cadel Evans, who would go on to win the 2011 Tour a month later. Wiggins didn’t manage to pick up a stage win (he was narrowly defeated by Tony Martin in the race’s main time trial), but his overall triumph proved he had the attributes to win, and defend, a yellow jersey.

2012: Narrow but crucial Paris-Nice win

Just as important as Wiggins’ win in the 2011 Dauphine was his victory in the following spring’s Paris-Nice, which would set the ball rolling on a glorious 2012. He finished second on the opening-day prologue and then took the leader’s yellow jersey on stage one, but he had an overall lead of just six seconds over the Netherlands’ Lieuwe Westra going into the final stage’s individual time trial. Westra pushed hard in a bid to overhaul his slender deficit, but Wiggins just managed to hold him off on the hilly 9.6km course to win the stage by two seconds and the overall title by eight seconds. With this momentum, he went on to win the Tour de Romandie, a second successive Dauphine and, ultimately, the Tour de France.

2012: Time-trial victory in Chartres

Wiggins’ Tour de France win was years in the making, but this was the moment it was effectively sealed. Taking a lead of 2min 5sec into the stage 19 time trial from Bonneval to Chartres, he needed only to avoid crashing or a disastrous drop in form to ensure he retained the yellow jersey for the largely processional final day into Paris. Instead, he continued to push hard and won the stage by a crushing 1min 16sec over team-mate and eventual runner-up Chris Froome. Wiggins celebrated by punching his hand into the air as he crossed the line in what is now an iconic image.

2012: Sealing Tour de France title in style

It is fair to say that British cycling will never get better than July 22, 2012. Wiggins safely negotiated the 21st and final stage of the Tour de France to become the race’s first British winner – and did so in the most impressive fashion. Traditionally, the race leader hangs back in the Tour-ending sprint finish on Paris’ Champs-Elysees to avoid crashing, but instead, Wiggins placed himself in the thick of the action to lead out friend and team-mate Mark Cavendish, who was the reigning world champion. The sight of the yellow jersey being followed by the rainbow jersey is rare at the best of times, but to see them in tandem on the Place de la Concorde and Champs-Elysees was doubly special. Cavendish went on to win the sprint for the fourth year in succession to cap a truly unforgettable moment.

2013: Knighthood

Very few sportspeople are made Knights or Dames in the middle of their careers but Wiggins was given that honour in December 2013 in recognition of his services to cycling, and in particular his 2012 Tour de France win and Olympic time-trial victory ten days later. Wiggins admitted afterwards: "It was quite nerve-wracking actually. I mean it's quite humbling, really, being here. I was just talking to some of the other people getting stuff, and asking them what they have been honoured for, and they are historic things, ground-breaking sciences or whatever. I have won a bike race, you know, and I feel a little bit inferior to everyone, really.”