Pidcock The Peerless

After an annus mirabalis that saw the young Yorkshireman take road, cross and track wins, double world champ Tom Pidcock looks like British cycling’s next star

- Richard Abraham

Tom Pidcock’s father, Giles, had a dream the night before the Cyclo-Cross World Championships in January. He and his wife were nervous, as they often were before their son’s races — “sometimes it feels like you’re sending your kids off to war and you’re just waiting for them to come back safe” — and he tossed and turned, thinking about the frigid course in Luxembourg with its treacherous black ice that had led even the Belgian team to call for a postponement.

“I woke up in the middle of the night and I’d had this dream that Tom had just won, and he’d won by 38 seconds,” Pidcock senior recalls. “I was only half awake and so I thought to myself, ‘Oh that’s alright then,’ and then went back to sleep. And then in the race he won by 38 seconds. Weird.”

Perhaps there’s a genetic trait for cycling premonition being passed down the Pidcock line via the Y chromosome, because every now and again, Tom Pidcock himself gets a certain feeling about his upcoming races.

“When you win races, you think it feels easy but it’s just a day when you’re absolutely on the top of your game. Nothing goes wrong. It’s sort of… you just stop worrying about what other people are going to do,” he says.

“You know what you have to do to win a race, and you just have to figure out… it just sort of happens.”