Giles Pidcock remembers a conversation he had with his 12-year-old son, Tom, about what it meant to truly ‘make it’ in cycling. “My view of success was getting paid to ride your bike, being a pro,” he says. His son had grander ideas. “Tom said, ‘F*** that. No, no, no. I want to win Paris-Roubaix, the Tour de France, the World Championships’,” Giles laughs. “His aspirations were just unlimited, and that struck me as being quite ambitious. But that’s Tom, isn’t it? Everything’s possible.”
It was four years earlier, when Tom was eight, that his passion for the Tour took root. Every July he would wait for his father to get home so they could watch the daily highlights on TV. If they were heading out for an evening ride, they’d record the broadcast to watch when they got back. It was only natural, then, that when Tom turned pro with Ineos Grenadiers in 2021, the race became a central ambition of his career.
But over the three editions he raced with Ineos, his enthusiasm for the event faded. He would describe it variously as “draining” and “not the most enjoyable”. Where had the excitement gone? Now, after a year away, Pidcock is back on cycling’s biggest stage. Riding for Tour debutants Pinarello Q36.5, he is on a mission to rediscover the joy that filled those childhood evenings.
“To find passion, you first need to, well, enjoy it. It’s all an upward cycle,” he tells Cycling Weekly in Tarragona, Spain, at the start of stage two. Perched on the top tube of his bike, he shelters beneath a canopy of trees in the media zone. When his team press officer limits the gathered journalists to a single question, Pidcock pushes back. “One question?” he says, before happily answering four.
It is all part of a new lease of life the 26-year-old has brought to the race. At the time of writing, he is fourth on GC, thanks to time gained in a smart breakaway move on stage 13. But Pidcock has always insisted his goals this time around are less tangible than a stage win or a high GC finish. “I want to enjoy being back at the Tour, and look forward to coming back here every year,” he says. “That’s the main thing. The rest is just a bike race, you know?”
It’s all smiles at this year’s Tour.
(Image credit: Zac Williams/SWpix.com)
To understand Pidcock’s fraught relationship with the Tour, you need to rewind four years to Alpe d’Huez in 2022. Pidcock wasn’t supposed to start the race that year. “When he joined Ineos [in 2021], we had a six-year plan with Dave [Brailsford],” says Pidcock’s father Giles. “It was going to be Cyclo-cross Worlds, Mountain Bike Worlds, one-day races, win a few Classics, and just have fun for as long as possible.”
But then, in only his second year as a pro, as the team scrambled to find a leader following 2019 champion Egan Bernal’s life-threatening training crash, Pidcock was thrust into the yellow-tinted pressure cooker. He responded brilliantly. Aged just 22, he broke away on the descent of the Col du Galibier on stage 12 and soloed to an awe-inspiring victory on Alpe d’Huez, becoming the youngest rider ever to win at the mountain’s summit.
“That’s one of the best experiences of my life,” Pidcock said at the finish. His career path seemed laid out. With hindsight, though, his father views the win with mixed feelings. “I think the Alpe d’Huez stage almost wrecked his career,” he says bluntly. “At the time, we were really excited because it’s the Tour. Then he won the stage, and everyone was like, ‘Oh, you’re ready. You can do this. You’re the next big hope.’ Everything from that moment was about winning the Tour.”
The following year, 2023, Pidcock returned to the Tour under a weight of expectation, targeting the GC. He finished 13th, faltering in the second week as the race entered the Alps, and admitted he felt like a “pretender” among the favourites. The 2024 edition proved an even bigger struggle. After catching a stomach bug ahead of the Grand Départ in Florence, he was dropped on Ineos’s pre-race training ride and faced a battle to regain his form. He ultimately withdrew ahead of stage 14, sitting 36th overall.
Some questioned whether Pidcock was truly cut out to be a GC rider. Why wasn’t it working? According to Kurt Bogaerts, his coach since 2018, bigger aspirations were eclipsing his Tour goals. “He’s tried to become world champion in all disciplines, and one big goal [in 2023] was becoming world champion on the mountain bike,” Bogaerts says.
“In Glasgow, it was a home race, and that was a big target, so you have that in the back of your mind… The year after [2024], it was the Olympics, and he had a massive goal to be double Olympic champion. That was only a few weeks [after the Tour].”
Pidcock burst onto the scene with victory on Alpe d’Huez in 2022.
(Image credit: Getty Images)
Pidcock’s relationship with Ineos had also soured. Reports of a rift with management surfaced at the 2024 Tour, and by the end of the season, he decided to leave despite having three years left on his contract. “By the end at Ineos, nothing was good enough,” one source close to Pidcock says. “Unless you won the Tour de France, it didn’t matter. No one cared.”
While around half a dozen WorldTour teams sought the Briton’s signature, he surprised many by opting for second-tier outfit Q36.5, backed by billionaire former Glencore CEO Ivan Glasenberg. The hope was that a smaller set-up would provide a fresh outlook. “I believed it was the best option for him,” says Jacques Sauvagnargues, a friend and former Team Wiggins teammate who later co-founded the app Link My Ride with Pidcock.
“I was trying to explain to him how [Mathieu] van der Poel went to Alpecin and they built the team around him. I just said, ‘That’s what you need. You need the team built around you. You had it with Wiggins and Trinity and you flourished in those environments.’”
Sauvagnargues’s theory soon proved right. Last year, Pidcock’s first season with Q36.5, the 26-year-old opened with victory at the AlUla Tour in Saudi Arabia before riding to third overall at the Vuelta a España in September – a career-best Grand Tour performance. “I think he proved everyone wrong,” Sauvagnargues says.
For Bogaerts, the podium was “confirmation” of the talent he had helped hone over the years. Why had it all suddenly clicked? A key factor in his Vuelta success was riding unburdened by expectation. “Every performance is a kind of celebration,” Bogaerts says of Q36.5’s ethos. Pidcock’s past Tour experiences, challenging as they were, had also taught him to manage pressure. But another simple, often overlooked reason drove his upturn in form: he started prioritising fun.
Sauvagnargues recalls a recent example: at the end of April, he and Pidcock went to Germany’s Nürburgring to drive race cars. The trip fell just days before the Eschborn-Frankfurt one-day race, yet Q36.5 approved it as a way for Pidcock to unwind. “I’m not sure if Ineos allowed a lot of the play, but with Q36.5, they appreciate that it’s quite an intense lifestyle that [the riders] live, and they need to release,” Sauvagnargues says. “Tom’s release is car track days… He’s an unbelievable driver. He could be a professional if he wanted to be.”
Pidcock’s breakaway bids have earned him two third places so far at the Tour.
(Image credit: Getty Images)
Pidcock also found fun this year at an early-season altitude camp in Chile, where he trained hard and explored new trails on his mountain bike. British champion Fred Wright, Pidcock’s teammate at Q36.5, was one of six riders who travelled with him to South America. “It was a bit of an adventure,” Wright says. It also proved critical for team building.
“We played quite a bit of [the dice game] Perudo and a bit of poker. In the end, we had a big leaderboard of games and whoever had the most points at the end of the camp won the prize pot we’d all put money into.” Who claimed the haul? “Tom – on the last night,” Wright laughs. “I was gutted. I was leading and I lost it all.”
Trips like this have led Pidcock to praise Q36.5’s “family vibe”. “Everyone around me believes in me, supports me. We’re all in this mission together,” he told the Going Mental podcast in June.
Bogaerts, who also attended the Chile camp, has witnessed this first-hand. “I think the connection with the team is, of course, much stronger,” he says. “He is the leader there, he feels responsible for the team, he wants to look after the team, and that means a lot to him.”
Disrupted run-in
(Image credit: Getty Images)
Ever since Tom Pidcock’s Tour de France return was announced in February, along with the confirmation of Pinarello Q36.5’s invite, the race has been marked as a key date in his calendar. The road to get there, however, ended up being rough and winding.
Three and a half months before the start in Barcelona, Pidcock crashed into a ravine at the Volta a Catalunya, and suffered a tibia stress fracture, damaged knee ligaments and heavy bruising. “He had 11 days completely off the bike,” his coach, Kurt Bogaerts, says. “Eleven days! I can’t remember ever experiencing that over the years with Tom.”
Some feared the injuries would jeopardise Pidcock’s Tour plans. Remarkably, within a month, he was back winning at the Tour of the Alps. But good fortune didn’t last long; his final stage race tune-up before the Tour, the Tour de Suisse, was scratched from his programme last-minute after he fell ill with a viral infection. Again, he bounced back, this time with victory at the Andorra MoraBanc Classic. The race back to top form continues at the Tour.
In the moments after the opening team time trial at this year’s Tour, Pidcock cooled down in the middle of a row of turbo trainers, shoulder to shoulder with his teammates. While other teams did the same in silence, the Q36.5 comrades nattered away, laughing as they compared stories of the day’s test. Yes, Pidcock had lost almost a minute to stage winner Jonas Vingegaard and 45 seconds to Tadej Pogačar, but that mattered little. The important thing was that he had remained true to his sole race aim: he was smiling.
Speaking before the start, in the shadow of Barcelona’s Sagrada Família, after the team presentation, he had said: “If I finish in Paris, I’m happy, then it’s been a success.”
Of course, that won’t stop people asking what he’s capable of over the coming mountain stages. Four years on from his Alpe d’Huez triumph, the Tour returns to the same climb on its final weekend for a brace of summit finishes.
Fans might wonder if that presents the chance for the perfect full-circle moment – the ecstasy of that first Tour win, after years of indifference, repeated – but it’s not the be-all, end-all for Pidcock. His ambitions have always stretched far beyond the confines of a single event. The hope, perhaps, is that by riding at the Tour less weighed down by expectations, he might now fulfil his potential at the race.
“I think goal number-one is to try to win a stage,” his coach, Bogaerts, says. Pidcock’s already come close: on stage nine to Ussel, he placed third behind Van der Poel from the breakaway, let down not by his legs but a jammed gear shifter. “Today, I was really in the game,” he said proudly afterwards. Three days prior, the Tourmalet stage, he’d lost eight minutes to a rampaging Pogačar, but remained philosophical. “It’s not the end of the world,” he shrugged at the hill-top finish in Gavarnie-Gèdre, true to his new philosophy. “Just got to keep the spirits high.” Then came his third place on stage 13 to Belfort, and his leap back into the GC mix.
To pose to his father the same question he had asked his 12-year-old son: what does ultimate success look like? “Well, anything’s possible,” Giles says. “He’s surprised me enough times to know that anything’s possible.” That childhood dream may still be realised one day – and if it is, you can be sure it’ll be on Pidcock’s own terms.
This feature originally appeared in Cycling Weekly magazine on 16 July 2026. Some elements have been updated to reflect the results of stage 13.
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