Book Review: Start at the End, by Dan Bigham

Title: Start at the End — How Reverse-Engineering Can Lead to Success
Author: Dan Bigham
Publisher: Welbeck
Pages: 262
Year: 2021
Order: Welbeck
What: Part memoir, part management self-help book, it’s the uplifting story of how a team of underdog privateers triumphed in two rounds of track cycling’s World Cup and what their success can teach you about achieving your goals
Strengths: With Bigham now working for Ineos it’s a timely read, offering as it does some insight into his outlook
Weaknesses: You either buy the management self-help stuff or you don’t, there’s not much of a middle ground

It’s a tale as old as time. McKinley High’s glee club wins Nationals. Felix English beats Chris Hoy. The Rebels defeat the Empire. The little guy taking on the big guys and winning. Ordinary people pulling off extraordinarily heart-warming feats.

Once upon a time, Dan Bigham was that guy, the little guy, the Rebel taking on the might of the Empire. In 2015 Bigham finished seventh in the individual pursuit at the British National Track Championships, having only recently taken up cycling while at university (it was Oxford, you don’t need to ask, you’re all of nine pages into Start at the End before Bigham tells you he went to Oxford, which is actually a bit slow for the average Oxford graduate).

Over the course of 2016 Bigham set his sights on winning the team pursuit at Nationals and set about putting together his team. We’ll not do the Glee assembling-the-band sequence here and just cut straight to the end: Charlie Tanfield, Jacob Tipper and Johnny Wale agreed to join Bigham’s quartet. And in January 2017, on the boards of the Manchester Medal Factory, Bigham and his team-mates were crowned national team-pursuit champions, while Bigham added a second individual pursuit title, along with the kilometre, to his palmarès.

It didn’t end there. A year later, January 2018, on the boards of Minsk’s velodrome in Belarus, Bigham and his band of brigands – now made up of Wale, Tanfield, and Tanfield’s brother Harry – won the team pursuit at the last round of the 2017-18 World Cup series, leaving national federation-funded teams from around the world in their wake, while Charlie Tanfield bagged the individual pursuit. And then in…