David Millar, Giro d'Italia team time trial My English teacher forbade us from using the word ‘nice.’ He said it was a poor adjective. But tonight everything is nice.

We as a team have worked incredibly hard to achieve what we did today, and what’s important to me is that we had fun doing it, fun chasing excellence. For me, this is the start of the team’s next phase of growth on many levels. I can’t really explain it briefly, but I have that feeling.

I sit here looking around at the happiness we’re all living and can’t but help remember bumping into Jonathan and being introduced to Doug at the Tour presentation in 2006. I never dreamt what that encounter would lead to.

Jonathan and Doug have been constructing this for a while. They believed in it before anybody else. I came on as a ‘thinking outside the box’ moment from JV. The two of them aren’t here today because, to put it simply, they can’t be everywhere at once! But they’re here and the team we’ve built is doing what we dreamt it would one day do.

We won the TTT at the Giro today and Christian is in pink. He rode us into it those last 5 km and crossed that line first because he took us there. Whitey had tears in his eyes when we met him at the bus. He was crying out of pride. Whether we won or had lost, we had ridden it perfectly, the way we had spent the last eight days working towards. And that made him proud. And we were proud.

Jonathan has said, and I have repeated, it’s not just about the outcome, but the process. We were a living example of that today. Christian led the team over the line today, and behind him were over fifty people.

I think that’s nice.