Competing for the seventh time, the Wick-born rider has the honour of being the only Scot in this year's race.
"Well, unless David Millar is riding for Garmin-Sharp," he said. Millar isn't, so the partisan cheers will all be for the Raleigh-GAC rider when he embarks on stage three from Jedburgh to Dumfries on Tuesday.
For Oliphant, 30, the Tour of Britain, which gets under way today in Ipswich, marks the biggest race of this season's calendar and he is determined to make the most of it.
"I want to get a podium place on one of the stages," he said. "I will try to get away in a break too. It would be great if I could do that on the Scottish stage but I'm not specifically targeting that. The route from Jedburgh to Dumfries is probably the one that best suits me, but I think everyone will be expecting me to do it then so it may lack the element of surprise.
"When I'm racing I always look to see which British riders are local to that area as I expect them to try to get away in a break. You can use that to your advantage and get them to do a lot of the work."
The advent of cycling as a well-oiled global sport has meant that anyone with internet access can find an online race manual or employ Google Earth to do a recce from the other side of the world. But Oliphant still has the trump card of home advantage.
"I know where the roads narrow and the places where there could potentially be crosswinds so I can get myself up the front should a split in the peloton happen," he said.
He will certainly have lofty company. Bradley Wiggins returns to competitive action for the first time since winning gold in the Olympic time trial. The 2012 Tour de France champion will lead the Sky team alongside world champion Mark Cavendish, with Samuel Sanchez (Euskaltel-Euskadi), Ivan Basso (Liquigas-Cannondale) and Tyler Farrar (Garmin-Sharp) among the pro-cycling big guns competing in this year's race.
Cavendish, in his final race in the rainbow jersey, will be looking to secure victory in the points competition. It is widely expected that the Sky team will ride for the Manx cyclist, with wins in the bunch sprints in the early stages, including into Dumfries, the likely goal.
For Wiggins, the Tour will provide an unofficial extended lap of honour on the back of his victories in the Tour de France and the Olympic Games.
Australian team Orica-GreenEdge will make their Tour of Britain debut with a strong squad that includes Jack Bobridge, Sebastian Langeveld and Leigh Howard, while Jonathan Tiernan-Locke of Livingston-based Endura Racing, who gave one of the standout performances last year when he won the king of the mountains and finished fifth overall, could prove a dark horse in the general classification.
