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"Some of those old fights are still on YouTube - I almost cringe at how gangly and uncoordinated I was. But seeing the improvement makes me feel good."

Wiggins - a gangly north Londoner, from a broken home, brought up in poverty - made it to the very top of a sport that requires clinical preparation and a calm head under pressure.

But what about awkward, gangly prey, like humans, who unwittingly enter the nurseries?

"He came in at 15 years old, a really tall, gangly, skinny lad - didn't look like a footballer at all in all honesty," he says.

However, scientists have found it difficult to determine when brittle stars, a gangly group of echinoderms, started reproducing this way.