At just 10 stone and eight pounds, there’s not enough of Brad Wiggins to go round everyone who wants a piece of him.
It’s widely acknowledged that his historic achievement - becoming the first British winner of the Tour de France - couldn’t have happened to a more deserving bloke, the antithesis of the ‘spoiled footballer’ usually up on a pedestal.
His win also takes cycling’s profile to an all-time high - itself quite an achievement, considering recent medal hauls at Olympic Games and world championships, not to mention the relentless excellence of his Sky teammate Mark Cavendish, the reigning BBC Sports Personality of the Year and last year’s green jersey winner in the Tour.
Notwithstanding a recent gig for Cavendish as a celebrity mop for Head & Shoulders, sponsors from these shores have largely preferred track stars - Victoria Pendleton for Hovis and Sir Chris Hoy for Kellogg’s, while both plug P&G products - presumably wary of the doping culture once endemic in road racing.
But for someone like Coca-Cola, the Tour could represent an ideal opportunity in those fallow years between Olympic Games and major football tournaments - starting with 2013. Coke has to spend its money somewhere, after all, and has looked largely to music events to fill gaps in its sporting calendar.
Barring injuries, there will be no hotter sporting ticket in 2013 than Wiggins’ defence of his hard-earned crown. He may even be battling another Brit, his Sky super-domestique Chris Froome, for supremacy if Froome decides to leave Sky.
Coke might consider Wiggins the perfect match for Powerade, say. A different approach could be a Coke team - pro outfits are always on the hunt for sponsors, while Sky’s success shows what can be done with serious backing in a few short years. (Then again, the long-defunct Linda McCartney pro-cycling team, which briefly had Wiggins on the books a decade ago, didn’t fare quite so well.)
Whether Wiggins himself would fancy the extra exposure of a mega-bucks deal is open to question. He’s nobody’s idea of a corporate puppet, while his existing deal with Fred Perry is an obvious fit with his personal aesthetic. Either way, he won’t be short of offers.
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