Tom Pidcock is a company man. When Cyclist meets him in London in mid-November he’s here to promote his Link My Ride app (click here to hear what he says about that), is wearing a Red Bull hat and asks to hide his non-Ineos issue jacket logo from pictures. That’s despite secretly being in the midst of sealing his move from Ineos Grenadiers to his new team, Q36.5 – the only other team where he could continue his relationship with bike supplier Pinarello.
Looking after the needs of sponsors means ensuring that he is always being talked about. But that comes with its own complications.
‘That’s the media,’ says the 25-year-old. ‘They put you on a pedestal or they try and tear you down. There’s not really a middle ground. There’s no, “He’s doing alright.” You’re either winning or you’re the worst person in the world.’
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Life is a rollercoaster
Pidcock hasn’t experienced that more than in 2024. He had a consistent Classics campaign, with eighth at Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, fourth at Strade Bianche, 11th at Milan-San Remo and 17th at his first pro level Paris-Roubaix before finally getting an Amstel Gold Race win after losing out to Wout van Aert in a controversial photo finish three years prior. He finished the spring with a tenth at Liège-Bastogne-Liège and started the stage race season with sixth overall at the Tour de Suisse. But that’s where the problems began.
Just a day before things got underway in Switzerland, Netflix released season two of its Tour de France: Unchained docuseries following teams behind the scenes at the previous year’s Tour, and Pidcock didn’t come across well. He is captured saying, ‘My opinion is the only one that matters.’ He is resistant to supporting teammate Carlos Rodríguez’s more promising GC campaign – even breaking the fourth wall to ask to turn the cameras off when discussing it – and unapologetically ignores team orders.
‘I was made out to be the fucking bad guy,’ Pidcock tells Cyclist. ‘That actually created quite a lot of negative media around me, but you can go and ask any of my teammates – they all think I’m a good guy. No one who wants to win is an angel.’
The fallout from the documentary was compounded by a disappointing Tour de France, where he missed out on a stage win in Troyes by a whisker before dropping out of the race ahead of Stage 14. That was the low point. Fast forward to the Olympics in Paris a month later and, back on his trusty mountain bike, Pidcock performed a miracle manoeuvre, coming back from a puncture to overtake leader and home favourite Victor Koretzky on the last lap to win his second MTB gold in a row amid a rousing chorus of French boos.
That may have helped his public perception in Britain, but rumours of a potential departure from Ineos Grenadiers began to pick up. Things came to a head in the Italian Classics when, after coming second at Giro dell’Emilia, he was unceremoniously dropped from the team’s Lombardia line-up days before the race. And as we know now, that was that.
All that glitters
When Cyclist sits down with Pidcock he’s in the middle of negotiating his exit from Ineos and is under strict instructions not to talk about the team. The closest he comes is saying, ‘A few things didn’t fall into place, obviously things have been difficult.’ However he can lift the lid on his personal struggles last season.
‘It had its ups and downs. It felt bloody long, that’s for sure, but I think it was not bad,’ says Pidcock. Although he admits even the good parts were more challenging than they appeared from the outside.
‘I didn’t enjoy the pressure,’ he says of the Olympics. ‘I put too much on myself because it was what I wanted to do all year. And then the race, how it happened with the puncture, I didn’t enjoy the race. It was a bit much – I’ve never been so exhausted off the finish. Normally you finish a race, you’re tired, you get your breath back and then you’re fine. Your legs might hurt but whatever. But there, honestly, I was cooked. I was feeling sick waiting for the podium and leaned on this railing with my head down. I was just gone.’
He even struggled to enjoy the result once he recovered: ‘With big events like that it’s always more relief than happiness because, to be honest, I was the favourite – all I could do was lose. I could meet expectations or lose. I should have just chilled out a bit. Sometimes I feel like I’m not really bothered, so I wanted to hype myself up a little bit, but then I did it a bit much.’
The good old days
The life of Tom Pidcock hasn’t always been so contentious, but it has always been about the bike. He was so young when he did his first wheelie that he can barely remember it, but Pidcock relishes talking about the early days – when there was no pressure.
‘I used to ride to school every day on my BMX and go to the skate park. I also used to go with my brother, a neighbour and a friend to the park and see who could get the muddiest bike,’ he says, although he insists that’s not where his love for cyclocross began. ‘I never had a cross bike; my first cross race I did on a mountain bike.’
When he was old enough (hint: it wasn’t much later), racing came naturally. But despite coming from a cycling family, there was never any pressure to take it too seriously.
‘It’s not their job to push me. It was if I wanted it, I wanted it. I never took it seriously. I would come home and eat half a packet of digestive biscuits, five oranges and a Twirl. That was my snack after school. If I ate like that now I’d get dropped after about 30km in a race.’
While he moved up the ranks, winning at every level, he earned a name for himself as a 16-year-old racing against adults in the National Series crit races, showcasing his daredevil technical ability on a big stage for the first time.
‘The good old days, doing the tricks, that was good fun actually,’ he says, admitting he’s sat down to watch the highlights package Five Times Tom Pidcock Shocked The World Before He Was Famous on YouTube.
‘That me would beat me now, I’m pretty sure,’ he says, and he’s only half-joking. Despite appearances Pidcock is open about the fact he can’t take risks like he used to. He talks about another viral appearance on YouTube, hurtling down a descent in America with Safa Brian at what looks like breakneck speed.
‘Actually, we didn’t send it that hard,’ Pidcock says. ‘We went fast to make it look good, but we weren’t fully committed. If I was younger, I would’ve gone, “I’m going to see how fast I can get,” but now there’s more to lose.’
Despite that, his Instagram profile bio includes the mantra ‘You only live once’, and he’s clearly not done with the risk taking.
‘I think the threshold of impacting my quality of life or what I want to achieve in life, it goes higher up the risk scale than other people. I’m not going to say, “I’m not going to do that because it’s dangerous.” That’s what I like to do. I’m a bit of a thrill seeker in that sense.’
Join the Q
That might help to explain the real headline story. The star rider of Ineos Grenadiers, once the dominators of pro cycling, has cut his contract short to move to Q36.5 Pro Cycling, a team who aren’t in the WorldTour and rely on wildcard invitations to all the big races.
On the surface, it’s explained by a lack of options given the late notice in the transfer window and his big salary, as well as the team’s connection to Pinarello (they’re both owned by South African billionaire Ivan Glasenberg), with whom Pidcock has cultivated a personal relationship, helping to develop its Dogma XC mountain bike in the process. While he’ll be riding Q36.5’s official sponsor Scott’s bikes on the road this season, he’s sticking with Pinarello off-road.
It’s a risk, but in 2024 Q36.5 got invites to the cobbled Classics and they've got the call up to spring's biggest races once again in 2025. And despite aiming to become a yellow jersey contender earlier in his career, Pidcock says his priority now is to win a Monument.
‘I need to re-find my love for the Tour,’ he says. ‘The last two years have been difficult. Honestly, I didn’t enjoy it that much, but that first year was incredible. The Tour is the biggest race in the world – stage wins change lives. But when you’re getting your head kicked in it’s not fun. Last year I started with an illness, came round, almost won a stage, more chances in the last week, got Covid, went home.’
It seems, on reflection, Stage 9 at the 2024 Tour was a turning point. Had Pidcock just got the other side of Anthony Turgis in the final sprint, his season would have consisted of a big Classic, a Tour de France stage win and Olympic gold – and Pidcock happily admits that would have been a ‘pretty good’ year. A Tour win may have turned Ineos’s season around too, but for the team of marginal gains, a marginal loss has led to a big one.
Pidcock won’t look favourably on 2024, but this year provides a new start with a new team and new goals. It seems almost certain his biggest wins are yet to come.
Pidcock on…
Link My Ride
'It's an app to allow people to find and organise group rides. At the moment people use Whatsapp and Facebook and other platforms, but we want to put it all in one place and allow people to have a better tool for creating and finding group rides. Say you've got an existing group of friends and you organise a ride, you want to see who's coming. Or like us in Andorra, we don't know which riders are round because people are away racing, you need to message different people to find out who's there – you can go on Link My Ride, you can just put a group ride our and see who's coming.
'This new wave of cyclists that came in during Covid, they need to stay in cycling. Back then they had the time, they could just go out and enjoy, but I think now when people go back to work and they need more motivation to go on the bike, riding in groups is a brilliant way to do that. At home in Leeds the chain gang is barely a thing anymore, we used to have 60 guys on Tuesday and Thursday. It's all dying a bit, so we need to help it as much as we can.'
- To download the app or find out more visit linkmyride.com
What he’d be if he wasn’t a cyclist
‘I never really thought I’d be doing anything different because I knew that I could have a living from cycling. Not that I ever thought about it being my job. I was just doing what I was doing. I don’t really know the real world – I’ve never applied for a job.’
The secret of his epic Col du Galibier descent
‘If you go in blind, it’s difficult, but when you’ve got a motorbike to follow it helps a lot. And you can’t really see that from TV.’
His Olympics MTB move
‘If the opportunity didn’t open up, there wouldn’t have been any move – it would have been a sprint down the finish straight. Victor’s pretty fast in a flat-out sprint. He’d beat me, but he had been going full gas for half a lap, so who knows?’
His 2025 goals
‘After the Olympics I said to my girlfriend that I want to prove myself on the road and focus on that. Last year we tried to fit getting points for the mountain bike around the road, and that was the goal in my head, but now that’s done I can switch my focus. I want to win a Monument.’
His first pro Paris-Roubaix
‘I thought it would be great, just drop in and it would be alright. I never really get blisters in mountain biking, but with about 50km to go at Paris-Roubaix my hands were so blistered I was having to hold the bar carefully and my wrist was hurting. It was painful. I think I need a little bit more preparation if I’m going back there.’
