Tom Pidcock may be both the world and Olympic mountain bike cross-country champion after Saturday’s success in Glentress Forest but he knows he remains an “outsider” in the discipline’s tight community.
Pidcock underlined his supremacy in Saturday’s cross-country Olympic race at the UCI Cycling World Championships as he shrugged off mechanical problems to comfortably beat Sam Gaze, with 10-time world champion Nino Schurter taking bronze.
But after a weekend of recriminations over preferential grid placements given to a handful of star riders – something Pidcock condemned despite benefitting from – and complaints over his aggressive racing style, the 24-year-old admitted his titles do not give him full membership of the club.
Pidcock secured bronze with a late lunge into the final corner of Thursday’s race, sending Luca Schwarzbauer to the ground, and the German then complained that “no mountain biker would do this at all, like a pure mountain biker, (of) the community”.
Pidcock had defended his riding style after the race by quoting Ayrton Senna, saying “if you no longer go for a gap, you’re no longer a (racer)”.
Asked about Schwarzbauer’s comments on Monday, Pidcock told PA Media: “For sure I am an outsider. I don’t know everyone super well. I know the people I see frequently and race against and the British guys, but I am an outsider.
“I don’t do all the races. I don’t know everybody. I only know a few teams that I’ve worked with in the past, but I am an outsider and when I’m at a race I feel that.”
Schwarzbauer called Pidcock “unsportsmanlike” after their coming together, but for Pidcock the incident was forgotten almost immediately as he turned his focus to his primary target – Saturday’s XCO race.
“I was more annoyed I had to wait an hour for the podium,” he said. “I forgot about it after five minutes.
“But I wanted to make sure I didn’t have any regrets from the short track going into the race because that would have annoyed me. I went in to try and get a medal in front of the home crowd so that’s what I did.”
Before the race Schwarzbauer had been one of 20 signatories to an open letter complaining about a UCI decision to adopt a World Cup rule and elevate road racing stars Mathieu van der Poel and Peter Sagan to the fourth row of the race, rather than the 13th row as their UCI ranking should have placed them.
Pidcock also benefited as he was moved up from the fifth row but, speaking at the race, called the move “bull****” given he had sacrificed three weeks of his preparations for the Tour de France to race in the Novo Mesto World Cup and secure enough UCI points to ensure a decent starting position.
Hunting points will be his mission again when he shows off the rainbow stripes at the World Cup in his adopted home of Andorra later this month and – after he races the Tour of Britain on the road – World Cups in north America in late September and early October.
Those World Cups mean Pidcock will skip the Il Lombardia road race, but his eyes are firmly on defending his Olympic mountain bike title in Paris next summer, after which the 24-year-old knows it might be time to put away both the mountain bike and cyclo-cross bike to focus purely on the road.
“I think the plan with the team is I commit to mountain bike until Paris and after that we have a talk,” he said.
“I sacrificed three weeks of prep for the Tour to do the mountain bike. If I want to ever try and really win the Tour I would have to focus on that, but at the moment it’s working quite well.”
:: Tom Pidcock is a Red Bull athlete. To find out more visit his athlete profile on RedBull.Com
