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Tom Pidcock has enjoyed several huge moments in a still young career, but if he had to single out one for importance, he looks past his Olympic mountain bike title, his Tour de France stage win, Strade Bianche or the Amstel Gold Race.
The 24-year-old instead picks out his 2017 world junior cyclo-cross title – a victory which first alerted many to the huge potential of the young Yorkshireman.
“That was the moment,” Pidcock told the PA news agency of a race around an icy circuit in Bieles, Luxembourg.
“That season, I won every single cyclo-cross race apart from one where I crashed. There I realised, one, I can deal with the pressure, and two, this is as good as it gets. I won every race.”
The hype around Pidcock immediately ramped up as he got the front-page treatment in a major cycling magazine before he had even gone pro.
From that moment there were huge expectations, but Pidcock had a lesson in how to handle them – within months he won the junior Paris-Roubaix and the junior world time trial title.
“It probably set me up for the rest of my career,” Pidcock said. “It was my goal for the whole year since the year before when I started the (2016 junior worlds) at the back, crashed three times and finished fifth. I thought, ‘next year, I want to win this race’.
“Performing under pressure is probably the biggest thing, the biggest barrier to performing for something who’s capable of winning. It was learning how to deal with that.”
Pidcock has been racing bikes almost as long as he has been riding them – competing in his first event aged just seven.
Cycling was simply what Pidcock did with his time, whether it was riding his BMX to school, mountain biking on holiday, or heading to the park.
“I was racing very young, but my parents were good, it was never serious,” he said. “It had to be me that wanted to go. As I got older, my friends were all in the cycling community, so when I go training I saw my friends, and it was like that…
“I was never like, ‘this is what I’m going to do when I’m older’. I was doing what I was always going to do. I was a cyclist. That’s what I was doing. When I was in school, I went to school just because I had to. When I came home, I was riding my bike.”
Expectation and pressure still follow Pidcock around, but he has ways to reset. He now calls Andorra home, having renovated a home, and in his rare down time between races and training he loves to get off-grid in the mountains.
“I really like going backpacking,” he said. “I go overnight, I don’t take my phone. In one night I can reset. It’s amazing, really grounding.”
Pidcock made the transition from the front pages of the cycling press to the front pages of newspapers at the Tokyo Olympics in 2021.
A few days before his 22nd birthday, Pidcock became the youngest Olympic mountain bike champion, 79 days younger than Sweden’s Jenny Rissveds had been when taking her title at Rio 2016.
Pidcock has huge goals on the road ahead of him, but has made a priority of defending his title in Paris this summer before focusing on anything else, albeit facing a disrupted build-up after Covid ended his Tour de France early.
“Being an Olympic champion is with you forever, more than anything else in sport,” Pidcock said. “You’ll always be an Olympic champion. It transcends the sport.
“People don’t care what you win a gold medal in – it can be the 100 metre final or synchronised swimming – a gold medal is a gold medal.”
