Aero expert Bigham fulfils pro-rider dream, writes Vern Pitt
The Team GB endurance track squads will, for the first time ahead of an Olympics, finish off their preparation at a dedicated facility in Loughborough.
The Loughborough Elite Athlete Centre and Hotel has 20 rooms that can thin the air to simulate being at 5,000m altitude, or below. This allows riders to get the benefits of living at altitude while training at sea-level at the nearby Derby velodrome.
A plan formulated by British Cycling scientist Steve Faulkner and senior physiologist Sarah Mosley will add the finishing touches to the endurance squad’s training.
Dan Bigham, the Ineos Grenadiers performance engineer who has turned pro at the age of 32, albeit just for the three months leading into the Olympics in Paris, said: “There’s been a lot on altitude – it is nice to see the acceptance of the importance of that. There are trade-offs and it’s how you deal with them, so they have put a lot of science into actually trying to understand it, which is really cool to see.”
He added that the advantage of going to the Derby track was that it made managing the schedule easier without the other members of the GB team needing to use the facility as well.
For Bigham the Paris Olympics is a milestone. He has been arguably the fastest amateur male rider in recent years, winning team pursuit World and European Championships with the British team and breaking the Hour record in 2023, all while holding down his full-time job on a WorldTour team.
But last month he began a three-month sabbatical from his Ineos job and started getting athlete funding from UK Sport, officially making him a professional bike rider.
