Help for Heroes’ annual Big Battlefield Bike Ride (BBBR), the charity's biggest fundraiser, is set to return for its 15th anniversary this year.

As registration for the 2023 event opens, the charity’s chief advocacy ambassador, Mark Elliott, will be among the first to sign up, continuing his record of attending all previous outings.

Little did he know when he rode in the first BBBR in 2008, that 15 years later he would have covered 3,000 miles and helped raise around £10 million.

Originally, the Help for Heroes’ meant to have just one BBBR to raise £5m for a swimming pool complex at Headley Court, a rehabilitation centre for injured military personnel after leaving hospital, but Mark and other organisers soon learned how much more need there was.

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Mark, 61, a former Grenadier Guard from Amesbury, said: “I’m not sure whose idea it was to make the BBBR an annual event. In those days we didn’t do a lot of thinking, we just got stuff done.”

Last year’s BBBR saw 141 riders follow the battlefields along the Somme, finishing after five days at the Glade of the Armistice, in Compiègne, covering over 300 miles and raising over £500,000.

Mark said he had never ridden a bicycle in his adult life before the first BBBR.

Mark said: “I wasn’t even a bit of a cyclist. I went on the first BBBR on an old bike and a pair of trainers. I bought myself a pair of Lycra shorts and thought ‘well, you just pedal!’”

This year's BBBR Dunkirk follows in the footsteps of the British Expeditionary Force and tells the story of Operation Dynamo, when nearly 340,000 troops were evacuated from the Belgian port in 1940. The ride will involve cycling around 70 miles a day over five days.

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Mark said the event is important because it gives people the opportunity to spread the cause for helping veterans.

Mark said: “All the people who have ridden on a BBBR effectively become Help for Heroes ambassadors because they’re immersed in our ethos for the duration. They get it; they understand it. And, afterwards, they’re out there in the public telling people what we do.”

Despite becoming friends with cycling legend Mark Cavendish and his wife Peta through his work with BBBR, Mark insisted he’s still not a cyclist.

He said: “I wouldn’t go as far as to say it’s turned me into a cyclist; I’ve got a bike and some kit ... I’m just an old man on a bike.”

Registration for the 2023 BBBR can be found here.