The two pre-eminent mountain bike racers in men's road racing are about to be reunited on fat tyres for the first time since 2023.
Tom Pidcock (Pinarello Q36.5) and Mathieu van der Poel (Alpecin-Premier Tech) are set to ride the Whoop UCI MTB World Cup round at Les Gets in France this weekend, with the XCO taking place on Sunday. It will be the first time the pair have raced mountain bikes against each other since the test event for the Paris Olympic Games in September 2023. On that occasion neither rider placed highly, with Van der Poel 28th and Pidcock 36th.
The Mountain Bike World Championships will be held the following weekend at Val di Sole, Italy, with both riders expected to race there too.
Of the two, only Pidcock, the two-time MTB Olympic champion, has raced MTB already this year. He won the Nové Město round of the World Cup in the Czech Republic back in May, as well as coming second in the short-track event there. Pidcock is a former world champion.
The Dutchman, on the other hand, has not raced on knobblies this year. His last race was the World Championships last September. On that occasion he finished well down the pack after a promising start, afterwards he blamed illness, saying: "I haven't been feeling well for a while."
Away from the mountain bike, Van der Poel has enjoyed a successful season this year, kicking it off with victory in the Cyclo-Cross World Championships in Hulst, Netherlands. He also netted a brace of Tour de France stage wins in July, including on the final day in Paris, when he escaped with overall winner Tadej Pogačar and held off the chasing field by a whisker. It was, he said afterwards, "something you wouldn't even write in a story book".
Pidcock, too, has enjoyed his high points this season, if in a less flamboyant manner. After taking a somewhat ad hoc approach to his Tour de France, he recorded a personal best ninth on GC in Paris, as well as taking two third places on stages. Away from the Tour, he took second place in Milan-San Remo, a whisker behind Pogačar, and won a handful of smaller races, Milan-Torino the most prestigious.
In light of the upcoming Worlds, whether they will leave everything on the trail this weekend remains to be seen, but it will be a treat to see these MTB masters racing against each other again.
