Much of the focus at cycling’s upcoming trio of Belgian classics will be on 21-year-old Briton Tom Pidcock, winner of Wednesday’s Brabantse Pijl cobbled classic, leaving world-class riders trailing in his wake.
All this just three months after the rider from Leeds signed his first professional contract with star-studded British outfit Ineos, some of whose riders might already be peering anxiously over their shoulders.
Pidcock’s bike-handling skills were picked up in cyclo-cross and he says that his main aim this year is to qualify for the Tokyo Olympics mountain bike event.
Photo: AFP
“I’ve been riding bikes daily since I was four, nothing is out of my comfort zone,” the youngster said in an interview on Ineos’ Web site.
Now the clean-cut Pidcock, who says he has never even drunk a coffee or eaten a sneaky meal of instant noodles, is a star in the making in road racing too.
With three high-profile Belgian one-day races this week, Pidcock laid down a landmark victory by out-racing the most feared man in one-day classics, local hero Wout van Aert.
“Now that was a proper bike race,” said Jumbo Visma’s Van Aert, who also loves mountain biking and elbow-to-elbow racing.
“I tried my best, but there was one guy stronger. I just saw the replay, he was stronger and I have to accept it,” Van Aert said.
Matteo Trentin, who was third on Wednesday, showed his respect for Pidcock, saying “the best man won.”
Not that he celebrated much.
“I feel a bit silly celebrating, I’ve grown out of it,” said Pidcock, although he added that he still loves the video game Fortnite.
One of the top newspapers in cycling-mad Belgium, Het Nieuwsblad, ran an editorial the day following his win with the English title “Tom Pidcock is the next big thing.”
Under the name of Sky, Ineos was the former home of Tour de France winners Bradley Wiggins and Chris Froome. Team chief Dave Brailsford has a track record of bringing riders through as he proved with Egan Bernal and his 2019 Tour de France win, when he was just 22.
Ineos’ Welsh road captain Luke Rowe was instrumental in teaching Bernal road nous, and Pidcock was swift to thank Rowe after his own first win.
“I’m here [in Belgium] to find my feet in road cycling, and I’ve been up there in a few races already,” he said in reference to the rave reviews he earned after Milan-San Remo and Strade Bianche, where he stood up well among an elite clique of the world’s top riders.
“Winning this race is good as it stops that trend of being up there, but not winning,” Pidcock said at the finish line on Wednesday. “Positioning is the most important thing in these races. I have to thank Luke and the team for that, Luke does a super good job.”
Pidcock said that he was feeling the pressure of the move up in quality.
“Before I could kind of correct bad positioning or whatever because I was stronger in the younger categories,” he said. “I might not even be in the front group at the next race, consistency is hard now, the level is so high, but I’ll race Amstel, La Fleche and possibly Liege too.”
Ineos have handed the rookie a lead role even with a string of stars alongside him including Richard Carapaz and Adam Yates.
After this week the mixed-event rider will dovetail his activities to qualify for Tokyo, with his first mountain bike race scheduled for May 1.
Revelations of positive doping tests for nearly two dozen Chinese swimmers that went unpunished sparked an intense flurry of accusations and legal threats between the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) and the head of the US drug-fighting organization, who has long been one of WADA’s fiercest critics. WADA on Saturday said it was turning to legal counsel to address a statement released by US Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) CEO Travis Tygart, who said WADA and anti-doping authorities in China swept positive tests “under the carpet by failing to fairly and evenly follow the global rules that apply to everyone else in the world.” The
Taiwanese judoka Yang Yung-wei on Saturday won silver in the men’s under-60kg category at the Asian Judo Championships in Hong Kong. Nicknamed the “judo heartthrob” in Taiwan, the Olympic silver-medalist missed out on his first Asian Championships gold when he lost to Japanese judoka Taiki Nakamura in the finals. Yang defeated three opponents on Saturday to reach the final after receiving a bye through the round of 32. He first topped Laotian Soukphaxay Sithisane in the round of 16 with two seoi nage (over-the-shoulder throws), then ousted Indian Vijay Kumar Yadav in the quarter-finals with his signature ude hishigi sankaku gatame (triangular armlock). He
RALLY: It was only the second time the Taiwanese has partnered with Kudermetova, and the match seemed tight until they won seven points in a row to take the last set 10-2 Taiwan’s Chan Hao-ching and Russia’s Veronika Kudermetova on Sunday won the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix women’s doubles final in Stuttgart, Germany. The pair defeated Norway’s Ulrikke Eikeri and Estonia’s Ingrid Neel 4-6, 6-3, 10-2 in a tightly contested match at the WTA 500 tournament. Chan and Kudermetova fell 4-6 in the first set after having their serve broken three times, although they played increasingly well. They fought back in the second set and managed to break their opponents’ serve in the eighth game to triumph 6-3. In the tiebreaker, Chan and Kudermetova took a 3-0 lead before their opponents clawed back two points, but
Taiwanese gymnast Lee Chih-kai failed to secure an Olympic berth in the pommel horse following a second-place finish at the last qualifier in Doha on Friday, a performance that Lee and his coach called “unconvincing.” The Tokyo Olympics silver medalist finished runner-up in the final after scoring 6.6 for degree of difficulty and 8.800 for execution for a combined score of 15.400. That was just 0.100 short of Jordan’s Ahmad Abu Al Soud, who had qualified for the event in Paris before the Apparatus World Cup series in Qatar’s capital. After missing the final rounds in the first two of four qualifier