Dan Bigham: The man who came in from the cold now hunting gold for Team GB

On Monday afternoon the 32-year-old from Stone will realise a dream he believed had long disappeared when the men’s team pursuit qualifying round kicks off seven days of track cycling at Paris 2024.

Just three years ago in Tokyo, Bigham was working as an engineer for the Denmark team which knocked GB, reigning Olympic champions in team pursuit since 2008, out of the competition.

Now those Scandinavian friends, to which he owes so much, will be rivals at the Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines velodrome.

“There is a reason I’ve been nicknamed the most compromised man in cycling,” chuckles Bigham. “It has been quite the journey. How did I get to this moment? It’s a question I’m still asking myself.”

Bigham’s achievement, above all else, is a testament to staying true to your beliefs and he can take huge satisfaction from becoming an Olympian having done things very much his own way. Obsessive about engineering, he has even written a book about it and describes himself as a “general nerd”.

“There are better athletes out there,” he says at one point. “I am not a physiological specimen. I was not a child prodigy. I am just a guy who thinks maths will help me to go faster.”

After graduating from Oxford Brookes University he spent a year on secondment with the Mercedes F1 team before looking to apply his scientific knowledge to track cycling. No more than a keen amateur riding at that point, having caught the cycling bug while trying to beat the Oxford traffic in his student days, he founded and rode for the trade team Huub-Wattbike which started regularly beating national squads at World Cup events.

But getting a chance with GB at that point would have required a compromise Bigham was not prepared to make.