It looked like it was all over for Tom Pidcock. With 23km to go on stage nine of the Tour de France, the Pinarello Q36.5 rider sat up in his saddle, gestured down to his bike, and wafted his right arm in frustration. A mechanical – at the cruellest time, on one of his best days – appeared to have put him out of a four-up breakaway finale.
He spun his pedals briskly, and still the gears would not kick in. Then, after a moment of panic, he was riding again, back into the lead group, and on to the finale in Ussel.
Pidcock ultimately placed third in the sprint, behind the day’s winner Mathieu van der Poel (Alpecin-Premier Tech) and Tobias Halland Johannessen (Uno-X Mobility). But it wasn’t a clean dash for the Briton. Afterwards, as he warmed down in the shade of his team bus, he explained what had gone wrong.
“In the final, my shifter stopped working,” Pidcock said. “I was out the back of the group on the last climb, and then I realised that the top button [the satellite shifter inside the hood] was working.
“Then once I got to the sprint, I was focused, and I was just instinctively on the drops and I couldn’t change gear anymore. Then I had to go on the hoods. It’s a shame.”
In previous near misses at the Tour – namely on stage nine in 2024 when he placed second to Anthony Turgis in Troyes – Pidcock has cut a dejected figure beyond the finish line. On Sunday, however, he returned to his team bus smiling, hitching a lift on the back of his team-mate Quinten Hermans’s bike.
The finale may not have played out how he wanted, but the performance showed his form is there.
“I think I was going super-well today,” Pidcock said. “I had really good legs, feeling strong. If I compare it to the last time I was in the breakaway at the Tour de France in the gravel stage, where I was second two years ago, today I was really in the game. That definitely shows that my level is higher.”
Pidcock had a stilted run-in to this year’s Tour de France. He abandoned the Volta a Catalunya in March after crashing into a ravine and suffering ligament damage in his right knee. He then pulled out of June’s Tour de Suisse, his final Tour tune-up, due to a viral infection, leaving him lacking in stage race preparation.
All things considered, then, his third place on Sunday left him feeling “not so disappointed”.
“I don’t think I would have come round [Mathieu] anyway,” he said. “I’m quite happy. I’m just pleased that I could change gear in the end, and that I was not in the peloton. At least I was there sprinting for the win.”
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