Dan Bingham set a UCI Hour Record of 55.548km on Friday at the Glenchen velodrome, breaking the previous record held by Victor Kampenaerts by 459m.

Bigum was already the British record holder with 54.723 km in Grenchen last October, but he was not eligible for the UCI Biological Passport inspection and therefore could not go for the Hour Record at that time.

The part-time rider then joined the staff of Ineos Grenadier as a performance engineer and was able to challenge the UCI Hour Record with the backing of the WorldTour team.

Bigum recorded a negative split on Friday, but perhaps a little faster than expected, beating Campenaerts' record pace. But the 30-year-old Bigam was undaunted, and he set a number of 16-second laps after the 30-minute mark.

"We had a five-minute split time, so I knew I had to get some time down and then get ahead of the record," he said. 'Then I started calculating what I needed to do to break the record. Every lap is 0.5 seconds better than the previous one, and that gives me a lot of confidence."

Campenaerts' previous record of 55.089 km was set in the highlands of Aguascalientes, Mexico, in April 2019. Bigum's compatriot Alex Dowsett was the most recent athlete to attempt the hour record, but his attempt in Aguascalientes last November fell 500 meters short.

Speaking to Cycling News this week, Campenaerts suggested that Bigum could break his own record. When Bigam set the pace at the Tissot Velodrome on Friday, he never flinched.

"You won't be able to pick up the pace until you've done a couple of laps. I was just passing the halfway point, and I thought, 'How am I going to do a 16.0-second lap for the next 30 minutes? But it wasn't there at all. I felt like I had it under control and just kept going."

Bigum passed Campenaerts' mark with just over 30 minutes to spare, pushing the UCI Hour Record to 55.548 km. 'I really, really enjoyed it,' he said. I wanted 55.5km in my head, so to add another 48 meters to that, I'm pretty happy."

In fact, Biggham ran more distance than in all but one attempt, which was erased in 1997 when the UCI reset the rules regarding equipment for the Hour Record. Bigham surpassed Tony Rominger's 1995 record of 55.291 km, but Chris Boardman's 1996 record of 56.375 km (run in the illegal "superman" position) has yet to be broken.

The UCI's decision to further tweak its rules on equipment in 2014 set off a new wave of record attempts, with Jens Voigt, Matthias Brendl, Rohan Dennis, Dowsett, Bradley Wiggins, and Kampenaerts all making their way through Friday's Bigum effort. established a new benchmark in front of them.

Bigam first attempted the Hour in 2015 as a student at Oxford Brookes University, running just under 47 km at Reading's Palmer Park Stadium.

On Friday, Bigam paid tribute to the support provided by the Ineos Grenadiers for this challenge. It had been reported that Ineos' Filippo Ganna would attempt the Hour Record this summer, but the time trial world champion has postponed his challenge until later in the year or next season.

"I received incredible support from Ineos," Ganna said. Not just the equipment and the people who would listen to me talk about CDA all day long, but the execution, the physiology, the thermal intervention, the nutrition, all of those things, they absolutely strengthened me."

"The support around me is second to none. Life is so much easier now that all I have to do is come here and perform. Even this week, I didn't have to worry about the bike, the mechanics, the timing, the live stream, anything. I didn't have to cook dinner, I didn't have to load the dishwasher. Everything you would expect from a team at this level.