Excitement reached a climax at the Paris Olympics velodrome in the closing stages of the men's team pursuit gold medal final between Great Britain's quarter-miler and his Australian rival.

With two laps to go, Great Britain was within two-tenths of a second and accelerating behind the strong Ethan Hayter, but in a last ditch effort, Ethan almost fell over in pain. Both teams pushed each other to the limit and the British had a nail-biting battle.

Hayter rounded the track on the top tube and Great Britain finished in 3:44.394, more than two seconds slower than Australia.

"I was so close. My whole body went limp and I was struggling to pedal the bike at the end," Hayter told the BBC after the race.

Dan Biggum, the team's aerodynamics specialist, "Landamar," and responsible for a quarter of Wednesday's engine, explained that the mistake was the result of the team forcing Hayter into a long pull.

"We were off by three-tenths of a second in qualifying. This was either just a slow change or a bad lap time," Biggum told Cycling News and the assembled media after the race.

Australia set a new world record in the first round, and Biggham said Britain would have to go for a new world record to win gold. They changed their strategy for the final and put a lot of work on the shoulders of their strongest player, Hayter.

"We gave him 4.3/4 (laps pulled). Normally that's four laps and a quarter. Hayter did not have the full throttle in qualifying. Ollie [Wood], Chaz [Charlie Tanfield], and I had to suck on his wheel and hope for the best. [Hayter] found the limit that time and it just happened to be the edge of the saddle. We got within two-tenths of a second with a lap to go, which was exactly where we thought we needed to be and how we needed to be to do that. It's just frustrating that we came so close to pulling away.

"This is the nature of Team Pursuit, and at this level we are literally on a knife-edge. At the tail end, you're trying to get three athletes to cross the line completely empty and fully cooked.

The British team was affected by Bigham's fall in training on Friday. He skipped the first round after crashing in qualifying, coming back only slightly behind the best.

"In the last eight years I have never crashed on the circuit, but I crashed at the worst possible time. I can't hide the fact that I wasn't at my absolute best today. It is certainly frustrating. That could be the difference between a gold medal and a silver medal."

Bigham paved her way to the Olympics in a very unconventional way. While racing as a low-level professional, he studied aerodynamics and applied his knowledge and skills to turn his physiology into enough performance to become an Olympian.

"One of the things we strive for is to be the best executing team. We pride ourselves on riding as flawlessly as possible in terms of line taking, posture in the corners, and changes. Not to speak for myself, but we are not the most powerful team in the world. We are not like Filippo Ganna, Jonathan Milano, or Sam Welsford. [So in the final, they put Chaz in second and put me back in third. Chaz's threshold is a little higher than Ollie's and he can hang in there even when Hayter is at full strength.

Bigham is a modern-day Graeme Obree, defying the establishment and being shut out of British cycling until he was finally convinced that aerodynamic advantage could take him much farther than physiology, nutrition, or training.

He made sure that he would leave his Olympic debut and his last Olympics with memories that would last a lifetime, even if the medal was silver instead of gold.

"It was a pretty cool experience. I want to end on a high. I'm not saying it wasn't high, but you can have one intention, and that intention is to try to win. It's a shame we didn't do that, and it was close. If you look through the numbers, you can probably find where we could have won, but right now there is only if buts or maybes.

"It's been a long, long journey. I look forward to telling my son in the future over a beer or a meal out, 'You were here and you saw me win an Olympic silver medal. It's so great and so unique.

"Hopefully, I can finish one more race at the World Championships in the best possible way, and I have some unfinished business in the individual pursuit with Filippo Ganna. But it was great. There is so much I want to show about STEM, about dual careers and about not just accepting the status quo, but about approaching the sport in a different way.

"I hope I can be a bright light in that there are so many ways to achieve performance and that you can do things your own way and not just follow the trodden path."

Bigham has made it clear that he does not intend to return as a member of the Ineos Grenadiers performance staff. He is expected to move to a rival world tour team.