"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’. It’s amazing what a few years can bring," Bigham, 32, told BBC Sport.

Bigham, who started cycling simply as a quicker means of getting to university, 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, where he was encouraged to apply his engineering to two wheels. He now balances his on-track commitments with his engineering role at road cycling team Ineos Grenadiers.

"Without engineering, I don't think I'd be in the sport, at least not to this level. 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,” Bigham said.

But this ideological approach was not welcomed by everyone. By 2018, Bigham was on the Great Britain cycling team but his ideas were rejected and his questioning was met with resistance.

"Basically (a coach) said 'be a rider or an engineer, you can't do both and be in this system'," he recalled.

Bigham was not ready to give up on something that meant so much to him, so he left Team GB 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. 

Huub-Wattbike’s success lead to Bigham being approached by 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.

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, 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,” he recalled.

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. The next year, he went to the national track championships and took four seconds off the British individual pursuit record. 

Bigger things were in store for him and with the support of his Ineos Grenadiers employers, Bigham broke the men's world hour record, riding 55.548km in 60 minutes. The opportunity to return to British Cycling arose with a new coach in place.

"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,” Bigham said. 

Just two years later, Bigham is a world champion and a double European gold medallist with an Olympic dream. "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," he concluded.