Cycling sensation Tom Pidcock reveals he knew since he was a child that he would turn professional

Ten years ago, Tom Pidcock sat at the family dinner table and his father Giles asked him what success looked like. To be a professional cyclist, perhaps? No, replied the 12-year-old Pidcock, that would happen anyway. Success would be to win the Paris-Roubaix or a stage of the Tour de France. Maybe even the whole thing one day.

A decade later and the world knows what it looks like and Pidcock knows how it feels: an Olympic gold medallist on the mountain bike, a world cyclo-cross champion and, now, a stage victory in his maiden Tour de France.

Not just any stage either, but on the brutal Alpe d’Huez where Pidcock became the youngest rider to win there. And not just any old victory but a thrilling, hair-raiser of a ride by a fearless young man with the world at his wheels. 

Rising star Pidcock is an Olympic mountain bike champion and has been tipped for a big future

A sensational 70mph descent down the mountains, as Pidcock glided around the corners of the Col du Galibier with the ease and grace of an Olympic figure skater.

On the way he weaved past Chris Froome, a four-time occupant of the yellow jersey and 15 years his senior, who finished third in the stage on his return to the Tour after a long injury lay-off.

‘It was a handing over of the baton, wasn’t it,’ said the great Bradley Wiggins. British cycling has its new sensation.

And, for Pidcock, that’s what it’s always been about. All the talk of winning races, stages and medals has been less about the titles and more about what they leave behind.

‘I didn’t really look at specific things to achieve,’ Pidcock tells Sportsmail. ‘I look more at my legacy. I want people looking back and saying, “He was a great cyclist”, you know, a Hall of Famer.

‘Of course, creating a legacy means winning. I want to become a global champion and want to try to win the Tour de France but they all create a legacy.’

Pidcock weaved past four-time Tour de France winner Chris Froome on his way to victory

Ever since Pidcock first sat on a bike, he has wanted to fly. And when he crossed the line to clinch the world cyclo-cross title in January, he threw his legs off the back of his bike, stomach flat against the seat, and stretched one arm out ahead — the Superman celebration of British Cycling’s latest superstar.

And, now, on cycling’s grandest stage as part of the Ineos Grenadiers team in his first Tour, he’s soaring once again. All of it, building his legacy.

So, too, does winning Olympic gold. Pidcock’s triumph in Tokyo, four days before turning 22 last July, was Britain’s third on Magic Monday after the triumphs of Adam Peaty and the diving duo Tom Daley and Matty Lee.

‘Before winning I didn’t understand how big the Olympics was,’ says Pidcock. ‘It just transcends cycling. I was on the front of every newspaper in the UK, on the news. The only other thing in cycling is the Tour de France.’ And, now, he’s experiencing it all over again. Pidcock, too, will soon transcend his sport.

In a way, it’s strange to hear Pidcock talk of legacy. Words like that usually belong in a veteran’s vocabulary — not that of a 22-year-old embracing the climbs and cobbles of the Tour for the first time.

Pidcock, 22, previously won gold in Tokyo and is now one of Britain’s most promising stars

He admitted he always knew he would become a professional cyclist – but wanted more

But the more Pidcock talked from his home in Andorra before the Tour, the more you realise he has the mind of an athlete way beyond his years. The drive, the focus, the self-belief. Pidcock described the idea of riding the Tour just to gain experience as ‘boring and dull’. It’s why he’s won so much, so young. It’s also probably why Pidcock is already one of the best-paid cyclists in the world, with Ineos Grenadiers reportedly paying him about £4million a year.

In an interview with BBC Look North eight years ago the 15-year-old Pidcock talked through how to tackle his GCSEs: watch less television and do his homework as soon as he got home to make time to go out on his bike.

It’s also why, years later, he left his family home in Leeds to set up home with girlfriend Bethany in the mountains of Andorra. To tune out the noise.

Anything that’s not training or scheduled rest is a distraction. That may explain why Pidcock refused to get out of bed on Monday when a fire alarm woke the riders at 7.30am on a rare rest day. He was so determined to sleep, joked Pidcock, that if there had been a fire he planned to run the bath, jump in with the duvet on and only then run out with the wet duvet around him.

And imagine what it must mean to hear Wiggins call him a star. It was his yellow jersey in 2012 that entranced the wide eyes of the younger Pidcock. ‘I’d come home from school and sit on the sofa, a metre away from the TV and watch the last part of the Tour and then we’d all sit down as a family at eight o’clock to watch the highlights as well.’

Now, it’s Wiggins who watches open-mouthed. What’s impressed him most has been Pidcock’s complete control of his bike, from the opening-day time trial in rain-drenched Copenhagen, where Pidcock swept around the slippery corners as though they had been baked in the sun, to the daredevil descent on his victorious Stage 12.

This, too, has been a skill long in the making. ‘When I started racing, I wasn’t the biggest or the strongest, but I was picky and tactical and won with my skills.’

Pidcock is a member of the Ineos Grenadiers team and suffered a high-speed crash in 2019

Former Tour de France winner and Olympic champion Bradley Wiggins gave high praise

He fell in love with cycling as a child, riding to school the long way round through the woods. Two months before the Tour, Pidcock delivered back-to-back wins with Red Bull in Albstadt and Nove Mesto in the Mountain Bike World Cup. Now, on the French roads he sits ninth overall and second in the battle for the white jersey for the best young rider.

Pidcock is, by his own admission, a ‘bit of an adrenaline junkie’. He used to ride down mountain bike tracks and jump off walls on a unicycle with his friends.

It is, however, impossible to be super-human all the time. A high-speed crash in 2019 at the Tour de l’Avenir left Pidcock with nasty cuts to his nose and mouth and needing dental surgery — an injury that dented his self-belief.

‘It affected me for a while,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t often go wrong for me, touch wood. I know my limits and I don’t push over them. But that was a mistake. I went too fast on a wet descent. And that knocked me back a bit. But you can learn from every mistake.’

Seeing him sweep down the mountains at the Col du Galibier suggests he’s done just that. Once again, he’s ready to fly.

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