Tom Pidcock Is Chasing A Second World Title On A Completely Different Bike

How far do you think Tom Pidcock will go at the World Championships?

  • World Champion

  • Podium finish

  • Top 10

  • Just hoping for a great race


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Tom Pidcock became mountain-bike world champion on 30 August. Less than a month later, the British rider will try to become world champion again, this time on the road.

The 27-year-old from Yorkshire is heading into the UCI Road World Championships in Montréal, Canada, with the elite men's road race taking place on 27 September.

And his timing looks pretty good.

Pidcock won the mountain-bike cross-country world title in Italy on 30 August. Just one week later, he swapped his mountain bike for a road bike and won the GP Industria & Artigianato in Italy.


Then, on 11 September, he finished fourth at the Grand Prix de Québec against some of the riders he could face for the world title.

Now comes the big one.

The World Championship road race will cover 273.7 km around Montréal. It is also extremely hilly. Over the full race, all the uphill sections add up to around 3,800 metres of climbing.

That could suit Pidcock.

He is unusual even among professional cyclists because he competes at the highest level across different forms of the sport. He is already a multiple mountain-bike world champion, a cyclo-cross world champion and a two-time Olympic mountain-bike champion.

But one major prize is still missing: the elite road world championship.

Winning it would mean wearing cycling's famous rainbow jersey in road races for the following year.

It would also make an extraordinary few weeks for the British rider, going from mountain-bike world champion to challenging for another world title on an entirely different type of bike less than a month later.

Pidcock has described winning the road rainbow jersey as one of the biggest remaining ambitions of his career.

On 27 September, Britain has another world title to cheer for. Pidcock has already proved what he can do on a mountain bike. Now we can get behind him as he takes on the world's best on the road.

How impressive is it for one athlete to compete at world-class level across several different cycling disciplines, and could we see more athletes specialising less in the future?
 

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