Surrey seems to be the hardest word.

We got to see Bradley Wiggins.

He was spearheading the chasing group in the Mens Olympic Cycling Road Race but to our mind it was a thankless and fruitless task given that a large group of motivated riders had passed us by at least 5 minutes before.

He had loomed out from a blind dip in the road some 100 metres from our rural viewpoint which gave plenty of time to activate the video function on my far from smart phone.

I had been practicing the operation for a couple of hours before the race arrived and consequently had a lot of two to three second movies, art-house style depicting the sky, the bushes, my feet, the blur of a circling buzzard and a man with his dog and all with a brief accompanying soundtrack of an overhead passenger jet, distant tractor or police motorcycle.

Even at the emergence of Bradley Wiggins, after a wait of 3 hours in the idyllic Surrey Hills landscape , I almost fluffed pushing the button but did get a reasonable shot.

Upon viewing later this clearly showed his concentration and determination to drag the race along but perhaps, with hindsight, an early realisation in his emotionless expression that it was a lost cause.

There was still about 120 miles of racing to go from that point.