Denmark engineer to GB rider – Bigham’s Olympic rollercoaster

As far as Dan Bigham was concerned, the door was shut.

Three years ago he was at the Tokyo Olympics. He could have been there alongside his former Great Britain team-mates, skin suit on, ready to race. Instead, he was there not as a rider, but as a performance engineer for Denmark.

He thought the page had been turned on his chapter as a GB track cyclist. Told to choose between cycling and engineering, Bigham had opted for the latter – his biggest passion.

Yet now he is fine-tuning for another Olympic Games. And this time, in Paris, he will be taking to the boards wearing the red, white and blue of Team GB.

“If you’d said to me at the last Olympics you could win a medal at the next one, I’d be like ‘I’m not even going to be there’,” Bigham, 32, told BBC Sport.

“It’s amazing what a few years can bring. There have been times when I thought maybe I’m at a dead end and maybe I should just be an engineer, maybe I should just get a normal job.

“I’ve always strived to connect as many dots as I can, keep moving forward. It means that I’m sitting here ahead of the Paris Olympics. Two or three years ago, I wouldn’t have even appreciated the path that I would have taken to get here.”

Bigham openly admits that he is an elite cyclist because he is an engineer.

With a Masters degree and a specialism in aerodynamics, his career started with the Mercedes Formula 1 team. He now balances his on-track commitments with his engineering role at road cycling team Ineos Grenadiers.

He started cycling simply as a quicker means of getting to university than the bus, later joining and racing with cycling and triathlon clubs. But it was during his time at Mercedes that he was encouraged to apply his engineering to two wheels.

“Without engineering, I don’t think I’d be in the sport, at least not to this level,” Bigham said. “There has to be something in the sport that really gets you up and that you’re passionate about.

“For me, as nerdy as it is, it is the application of maths, physics, engineering to the sport. And that in itself has meant that I’ve progressed to the level that I’m at.”

But his dual career was not supported by everyone. By 2018, Bigham was on the Great Britain cycling team but found he was the square peg in a round hole. His ideas were rejected, his questioning met with resistance.

“Basically [a coach] said ‘be a rider or an engineer, you can’t do both and be in this system’,” Bigham recalled.

“That was his ideological approach to being an athlete. For me that was not a path I was willing to go down, to give up on something that meant so much to me. So I went on my merry way.”

He was not quite prepared to give up cycling altogether, though, and set up a trade team. Team Huub-Wattbike took the track world by storm, regularly beating nations – including Great Britain – at track World Cups.

But such was their success, in 2019 the UCI – cycling’s world governing body – changed its regulations to only allow nations to compete at World Cups, something which Team Huub-Wattbike said was “brutally destructive” and would “kill off” the existence of trade teams.

It was later that year that Bigham approached Denmark, eager to share his knowledge with a team he felt were “leaving a lot on the table on the engineering side”. If GB were not willing to listen to his ideas, the Danes were all ears.

It paid off too. At the World Championships in early 2020, Denmark set three successive world records to win men’s team pursuit gold in Berlin, their time in the final more than five seconds quicker than Team GB had gone in winning Olympic gold four years earlier.

At the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, they won silver – defeating GB in a controversial semi-final.

“To go to another nation and see how they function and how they tackle performance was really helpful, but also at the same time they enabled me to train with their athletes,” said Bigham.

“I was actually on the track racing in their men’s team pursuit team and even in their pre-Tokyo full dress rehearsal, I ended up riding in the A-team and was the first British rider sub-3:50, obviously completely unofficial, but I thought that was the pinnacle of my career.

“We printed off the timing sheet and everyone in the velodrome signed it. That was a really poignant moment and I thought this is the best I will ever do in team pursuit.”

Such was Bigham’s form after his time in the velodrome with the Danish squad that in September 2021, he broke the men’s British hour record, one day after his now wife, British cyclist Joss Lowden, set a new women’s world hour record.

In 2022, he went to the national track championships and took four seconds off the British individual pursuit record, yet bigger things were to come that year when, with the support of his Ineos Grenadiers employers, Bigham broke the men’s world hour record, riding 55.548km in 60 minutes.

But 2022 was also the year that the door creaked back open. With a new coach in place, the opportunity to return to the British Cycling set-up arose.

“When I came back things were very different,” he said. “Not just from a staff perspective, but culture perspective. It is very open-minded, a lot more progressive, a lot more willing to have frank discussions about performance, about equipment, about strategy.

“I’m always coming up with new ideas and it’s nice to have other people to bounce those ideas around with, and they do the same with me, it’s not just a one-way thing. You feel respected and trusted, which is not what I had before.”

Two years on, Bigham is now a world champion in the team pursuit and a double European gold medallist on the track.

In Paris, he and his team-mates will seek to regain the men’s team pursuit title lost in Tokyo, with GB having dominated the event at the previous three Games.

Bigham never thought becoming an Olympian would be “an option”. Now, with that door wide open, he is ready to grasp the opportunity.

“I just want to go there and win. Best form of your life, best equipment ever, the highest-level race I will ever do,” he said.

“I’m most excited about going on track with four really good mates and seeing how fast we can ride, and seeing if we can win an Olympic gold.”