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 thats Tom, isnt it? Everythings 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, theyd 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 cyclings 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. Its 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. Thats 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 Pidcocks fraught relationship with the Tour, you need to rewind four years to Alpe dHuez in 2022. Pidcock wasnt supposed to start the race that year. When he joined Ineos [in 2021], we had a six-year plan with Dave [Brailsford], says Pidcocks 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 Bernals 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 dHuez, becoming the youngest rider ever to win at the mountains summit.Thats 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 dHuez stage almost wrecked his career, he says bluntly. At the time, we were really excited because its the Tour. Then he won the stage, and everyone was like, Oh, youre ready. You can do this. Youre 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 Dpart in Florence, he was dropped on Ineoss 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 wasnt it working? According to Kurt Bogaerts, his coach since 2018, bigger aspirations were eclipsing his Tour goals. Hes 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)Pidcocks 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 didnt matter. No one cared. While around half a dozen WorldTour teams sought the Britons 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, Thats what you need. You need the team built around you. You had it with Wiggins and Trinity and you flourished in those environments.Sauvagnarguess theory soon proved right. Last year, Pidcocks 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 Espaa 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 Q36.5s ethos. Pidcocks 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 Germanys Nrburgring 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. Im not sure if Ineos allowed a lot of the play, but with Q36.5, they appreciate that its quite an intense lifestyle that [the riders] live, and they need to release, Sauvagnargues says. Toms release is car track days Hes 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, Pidcocks 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 wed 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 Q36.5s family vibe. Everyone around me believes in me, supports me. Were 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 Pidcocks Tour de France return was announced in February, along with the confirmation of Pinarello Q36.5s 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 cant remember ever experiencing that over the years with Tom.Some feared the injuries would jeopardise Pidcocks Tour plans. Remarkably, within a month, he was back winning at the Tour of the Alps. But good fortune didnt 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 years 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 days test. Yes, Pidcock had lost almost a minute to stage winner Jonas Vingegaard and 45 seconds to Tadej Pogaar, 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 Barcelonas Sagrada Famlia, after the team presentation, he had said: If I finish in Paris, Im happy, then its been a success. Of course, that wont stop people asking what hes capable of over the coming mountain stages. Four years on from his Alpe dHuez 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 its 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. Pidcocks 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, hed lost eight minutes to a rampaging Pogaar, but remained philosophical. Its not the end of the world, he shrugged at the hill-top finish in Gavarnie-Gdre, 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, anythings possible, Giles says. Hes surprised me enough times to know that anythings possible. That childhood dream may still be realised one day and if it is, you can be sure itll be on Pidcocks 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. Subscribe now and never miss an issue.

Jonas Vingegaard's Tour de France teammate Bruno Armirail thinks that his leader could come good in the final week of the race and put himself in the frame for the yellow jersey, despite Tadej Pogacar's dominance and huge lead. World champion Tadej Pogacar has asserted his authority over the two sta...

Early on in my racing career a more experienced rider told me, The more worried you are about crashing, the more likely you are to crash.Always be suspicious of neat little formulations like this. They always leave a loophole in this instance he failed to appreciate the magnitude of how much I didnt want to crash. It turns out that if you spend the whole race cowering ten lengths off the back of the bunch, youre pretty safe. Of course if you want to get a result, you have to learn to mix it. But you dont have to learn to like it.Only one of the reasons I didnt want to crash was physical cowardice. The other was financial cowardice. I understood completely when my friend Bernard was involved in a sprint pile-up outside Saffron Walden and broke his collarbone. He rang me from A&E to ask how his bike was.Bar tape wrecked, saddle scuffed, otherwise its OK.Thats a relief. I tried to let my body take the impact first. The NHS doesnt fix bikes.This was in the merry days when stuff was cheap. When a whole pro-level bike cost just 2500, unless your crash involved a road roller or a giant vat of acid, your repair and replacement bill was a few hundred pounds at worst. (We still felt hard done by an equivalent generational leap further back in time took you to the era when you could fix most things with a hammer, some tongs and a good hot fire.)As bikes have grown more expensive and harder to fix, the attitude of most of the riders has, in defiance of all logic, become more aggressive. Where once you were terrified as you tried to edge up the outside of the bunch on your cheap bike by using the last available 25mm of tarmac, now youd be triply terrified on your expensive bike because thered be someone trying to move up outside you by bunny hopping the drain covers, and probably a 19-year old kamikaze coming up outside them on the grass.I think the worst job in all cycling is to be the parent of a young racer. I was chatting to one of them recently who told me that the price of kit combined with the fearlessness of youth meant it was like setting your teenager off to learn to drive by doing laps of central London in a solid gold dodgem encrusted with diamonds. If your family finances exist on a bit of a knife-edge, a pyromaniac would make a more attractive child than a wannabe bike racer.One suggestion I came across recently was to offer different racing classes based not on ability, but on the cost of the bike. That way you could race a cheaper bike and not be at a disadvantage. But theres a major problem. If I go racing, I badly want to be surrounded by people as cowardly as me. Ideally more cowardly. I dont want to spend my day riding at 50 kph among a whole bunch of people whove suddenly got one reason fewer to mind crashing. I might want my bike to be cheap, but I want yours to be expensive.It's got to the point where Im honestly amazed that amateur riders and juniors race on bikes that cost as much as they do. If, when I started racing, someone had told me that before I was finished most serious amateurs would feel pressured into buying super-bikes that cost very nearly as much as a new car, Id have assumed that everyone would ride two meters apart from each other and multi-rider crashes would be something old lags like me would tell anecdotes about.It says much for our bravery, confidence and above all for our financial irresponsibility that this hasnt happened.Great Inventions of CyclingBefore 2008, we all knew where we were with aerodynamics. If it looked aero, it was aero. And looking aero was about being thin, pointy and smooth. This applied as much to you as to your bike.Then in 2008 the GB Olympic track team debuted race suits that were a bit on the baggy side and covered in huge, ugly, deeply unaerodynamic-looking raised seams, which were designed to trip the airflow over the suit and introduce turbulence in a carefully calculated place. Everyone scoffed, right up to the point where the team hoovered up almost all the medals available to them.As a group, racing cyclists pivoted on the spot, and accepted the idea that things that did not look aerodynamic by the standards of looking aero could still be faster. After all, we didnt want to look stupid.This turn of events had the huge advantage for manufacturers that they could make things into funny shapes and declare that despite what they looked like, they were faster than any competitors product. Because we were all so sophisticated and knowledgeable, we had to believe them.As long as the weird bump, ridge, scoop or texture had a proprietary name that included aero in it somewhere, and came with a nice set of graphs, it was impossible to prove it didnt work short of actually testing it yourself. At just the moment that all bikes had been beginning to appear more or less identical, it was a valuable opportunity for some product differentiation.It's reassuring to know that were still falling for it.Acts of Cycling StupidityWord reaches us of a rider who was unlucky enough to crash on some ice over the winter. Among other things, his head hit the ground, fracturing his helmet into two halves.Being tight-fisted and perhaps a bit stupid, he glued the two halves back together, and explained to a concerned clubmate that, unless I have exactly the same crash again itll be fine, because the helmet will impact a different place and break a different way.Two weeks later he crashed again. Since his helmet hit the ground this time too, he was delighted at the cash hed saved. However, he was a bit disappointed with a mild concussion.He subsequently remembered that the helmet had come with a crash-replacement guarantee.

Since its very beginning, the 2026 Tour de France is being struck by intense heat waves. These have caused the shortening of stage 9, for example. The situation has brought back the discussion of whether the Grande Boucle wouldn't be better off taking place at a different part of the year. However T...

The race director of the Tour de France rebuffed Tadej Pogaars suggestion that the race ought to be moved from its July slot due to rising temperatures, insisting that the Tour will never not take place in peak summer.Record-breaking temperatures and heatwaves have gripped Europe throughout June and July, making conditions at the Tour extremely difficult for the peloton, roadside fans and everyone else covering the race.Speaking after stage nine, held under 38C sun, the races leader and defending champion Pogaar proposed a radical shift to combat climate change.If I had the power I would change all the calendar and not race in July and August in hot places. Id do a completely different calendar, but its not something I can do, he said.But when speaking with Cycling Weekly just a few days later, the Tours director Christian Prudhomme said that Pogaars idea was a non-starter.For me, its not possible not while Im in charge, Prudhomme said. Not because I dont want to, but because the Tour de France is July. Its France in July. When France gave people paid leave in 1936, that was the start of the popularity of the Tour de France. People came out to the race on their bikes on holiday. Thats the Tour de France. Its so much more than the biggest bike race in the world. It might be more difficult to understand if youre not French, but its so much more than that. There are so many people here they dont even know what the riders names are, but they love the Tour. The Tour de France works even if there isnt a French rider up the road That social aspect is paramount. Its what allows us to get the authorisations [from local governments to stage the race].Pogaar also said that he would be in favour of earlier start times. Currently, riders tend to depart between 12:30 and 14:00. Maybe the next step is to start the stages earlier. Yesterday there was a proposal to start at 10, but it doesnt change anything because then you finish in the heat, the Slovenian said.You need to start at eight or nine, or even before. Its a little bit shit, but I think the body can adapt to waking up at five oclock in the morning and doing a stage at eight.Pogaar would like to see major changes to cycling's calendar (Image credit: Getty Images)But Prudhomme also pushed back on that idea, mostly for practical reasons, although the supposed negative impact on television figures and therefore revenues is thought to be the main reason why ASO, the race organisers, would be against early morning starts.The women, who were starting at 9am or 10am, asked us a few years ago to start later. And we accepted the request because we saw it to be legitimate, Prudhomme said.Pogaar himself said at the Tour de Romandie that the development of womens cycling was brilliant, but womens races start too early.For stage starts, riders get up three hours before, if theyre staying locally. Thats only when were in a big city with lots of hotels. But to finish in big cities, its more and more difficult because you have to close down more roads. Im saying this to make clear that things cant change with a click of the fingers. Theres a lot that goes with it.Prudhomme was not dismissive of the impact of climate change, saying that were sure of the phenomenon and we know its drawing nearer. At some point, it will be inescapable. But is that in two years? 10 years? We dont know.It is clear that though the Tour is conscious of the issue, it is not yet prepared to drastically overhaul its product. Prudhomme did, however, point out some measures the Tour has taken in recent years.There are things that weve been doing for a while on the length of stages," he said. "Stages are getting shorter; 10 years ago, you had eight or nine stages longer than 190km. This year there are two: theres one over 200km and one over 190km. Next year there will be longer ones, but thats because were starting in the UK. If its 42C in Edinburgh then were in trouble. He continued: When we were planning stages in the mountains, we used to want something in the open, with no trees or anything, mostly for the television pictures, but also so that spectators could come, set themselves up for the day, and watch the Tour come through four or five hairpins. Today, its the opposite. The Col du Haag, near the Grand Ballon in the Vosges, is very forested. We sought it out because its steep, but also because its forested, and thats good for the riders. The most important thing, though, is the safety of the fans.

Mauro Gianetti insisted that Tadej Pogacar doesn't need a new danger to retain his motivation to win the 2026 Tour de France. The UAE Team Emirates - XRG rider commands the yellow jersey fight but faces a new threat after stage 13. UAE have found themselves in the thick of the action in one form or...

Tadej Pogacar has addressed recent Lance Armstrong comments after the American suggested that his stricken record of seven Tour de France wins is on the mind of the all-conquering Slovenian. The UAE Team Emirates rider is well on his way towards a fifth Tour de France crown, a triumph that would put...