Three years after watching Great Britain lose their long-held men’s Olympic team pursuit crown from a rival pen, Dan Bigham is determined to be part of the squad that takes it back.
Bigham will make his Olympic debut aged 32 when the track cycling starts on Monday, riding alongside Ethan Hayter, Charlie Tanfield and Ollie Wood in the pursuit after taking one of the more unusual paths to this point.
An aerodynamics specialist who used to work for Mercedes F1, Bigham admits he is not the most physiologically gifted athlete but he uses his engineering skills to push the envelope – and not just for himself.
In 2022, Bigham broke the prestigious Hour Record on the track, only to then help his Ineos Grenadiers team-mate Filippo Ganna better it two months later.
After butting heads with the previous coaching regime within Team GB, Bigham went to the Tokyo Olympics as an advisor to Denmark – who took silver as Britain, reigning Olympic champions since 2008, crashed out in the first round and finished seventh.
Bigham long ago felt his own opportunity to ride at the very highest level had gone, but British Cycling have welcomed him back. In 2022, he was part of the team that won the team pursuit world title at the Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines velodrome that will host this week’s racing.
“It means a lot of different things,” Bigham said of earning Olympic selection. “The key thing was that justification for the decisions I’ve made.
“I feel like I’ve attracted criticism or had people turn their eyes up a bit about the decisions I’ve made and how I’ve gone about my path.
“To be honest I’ve felt the same sometimes and some of that criticism is probably justified but it’s nice to be in a situation where you feel welcome, you feel you’ve made the right steps to get here.”
Bigham was the mastermind behind the Huub-Wattbike trade team that emerged after the Rio Olympics and challenged the thinking at British Cycling, regularly beating them in competition.
His passion has been to find gains wherever possible, to understand what is possible on the bike. He has not worried about being the one to get the glory.
“Probably really the understanding of performance is what drives me most,” he said.
“If you want the person that is physiologically the best it’s not going to be me sitting on the bike.
With the opportunity in front of him now, Bigham has had to be selfish. His former employers Denmark are major rivals. Ganna anchors the Italian squad that took gold in Tokyo.
Italy did so in a world record time of three minutes 42.032 seconds, more than two seconds faster than the record time of 3:44.672 set by Denmark at the 2020 world championships.
Bigham, who is never without a spreadsheet to analyse such things, believes that record could be broken in Paris but added that the atmospherics in Izu – a velodrome at altitude and with high humidity – was key to the fast pace three years ago.
Asked what it would take to win gold, Bigham said: “I don’t believe the jump will be quite so big (as in Tokyo). But even so I’d be pretty confident you’re going to have to fight for a world record in the final if you want to win. I think it’s a world record or thereabouts.
“I’m very sure we’ve got the quartet to do that. European champions. World champions on that track. We’re going fast. We’re all in a good place. Absolutely we can do it.”
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