The inspired decision behind Tom Pidcock’s charge to disrupt imperious Tadej Pogacar at Strade Bianche

Five months ago Tom Pidcock’s career at Ineos Grenadiers appeared to hit a wall. Rumblings of discontent between rider and management suddenly manifested themselves in direct and brutal action: Pidcock was dropped for the final Classic of the season, Il Lombardia.

The Briton had been second at the previous week’s Giro dell’Emilia, the runner-up behind the peerless Tadej Pogacar. He was in good form and clearly motivated. The move to unceremoniously drop him was as baffling as it was a serious indicator that Pidcock’s time at Ineos was over in all but name.

Over the winter Pidcock left cycling’s fading juggernaut for a dynamic, exciting team with half the prestige: Q36.5, an outfit operating a level below Ineos and fellow World Tour level giants like Pogacar’s UAE Team Emirates.

What looked like a demotion, a humbling of one of the sport’s biggest names, now looks like an inspired decision.

A visibly pumped-up Pidcock won two stages of January’s AlUla Tour, the first on just his second day racing in Q36.5 colours, en route to the overall title. He backed his early season form up with a stage win at last month’s Vuelta a Andalucia and a third place overall.

Neither of these races have the prestige of the Classics, nor did they feature the kind of full-strength start list that Pidcock will find himself on throughout this season. But Q36.5’s performances showed a cohesive team built around a rider of huge potential, who after a fallow couple of years looked to have rediscovered both his winning ways and his love for racing. Those wins weren’t just important for their symbolic value, or for the points they gave the team, but also as a harbinger of things to come in the Spring Classics Pidcock is targeting.

Some of Pidcock’s difficulty in the past seems to have come from juggling his aspirations as a one-day racer, at which he excels, with the very different beast of racing for GC at Grand Tours. But with Q36.5 not racing the Tour de France this year and away from Ineos’ fixation on winning the sport’s biggest race – at the expense of everything else – Pidcock is free to focus on what he does best: attacking, aggressive racing in the one-day races that suit him so well, like this Saturday’s Strade Bianche.

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The Tuscan gravel race – which takes its name from the famous ‘white roads’ of sterrata it covers – has been the scene of one of Pidcock’s biggest triumphs before, in 2023. That same year he finished third in Amstel Gold having spent more than 80km in a breakaway, and came second in Liège-Bastogne-Liège, a tough, attritional 250km slog through Belgium. On the basis of his form so far this spring and renewed love of racing, the 25-year-old is well positioned for even bigger triumphs, and his light frame and elite cyclocross and mountain biking background make him perfectly suited to Strade Bianche.

That’s without taking into account the presence of Pogacar. Last year the Slovenian swept the board of almost all of cycling’s honours, including most memorably the Triple Crown of Giro, Tour, and World Championships. Strade Bianche was his opening race in 2024 and it appeared no tougher than a training ride for him. He attacked 82km from the finish and simply swatted away the competition. Pidcock finished a respectable fourth.

This year the Slovenian is once again the overwhelming favourite in Tuscany, but Pidcock’s team have been bullish about his chances. “There is no reason to be afraid [of Pogacar],” a Q36.5 sports director said prior to the race. “He is strong, but if you have already lost in your mind, he will become even stronger than he already is. But Tom will definitely take on that challenge.”

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His chances are helped by the absence of two former winners: Classics-winning machine Mathieu van der Poel, who like Pidcock has essentially eschewed the Tour de France, and Visma-Lease a Bike’s Wout van Aert, another all-terrain superstar.

With that pair of big engines missing the field of possible winners has shrunk. One of those is Pidcock’s former teammate, Michal Kwiatkowski. Like Pogacar, the Pole – now in his 10th year at Ineos Grenadiers – is searching for a hat-trick of Strade Bianche titles. And like Pidcock at Q36.5, Kwiatkowski, always a steady pair of hands at Ineos despite the turmoil of recent years, has been among the riders on the British team to experience something of a revival this year. He won the Clásica Jaén, a one-day Spanish race with similar gravel sectors to Strade Bianche, and the team as a whole look to have embraced a new philosophy this year: more attacking, more daring, more free. It may be wholly coincidental, but the divorce seems to have benefited both parties.

While the manner of Pidcock’s exit was clearly not the most amicable, it seems that relations between the rider and his former teammates are good. But no doubt there will be a part of him that feels extra fired-up at the prospect of beating his old squad.

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The odds this year aren’t in Pidcock’s favour. Strade Bianche is a relatively new race on the calendar and its organisers seem to feel that making the course as difficult as possible is the best route to recognition as cycling’s ‘sixth Monument’, joining the most elite Classics. That benefits – you guessed it – Pogacar, who attacked on a steep climb last year and soloed into the sunset. And, it seems, Pogacar alone.

Last season one of the major problems in men’s cycling was that no-one knew what to do about the great man. It felt like even the biggest names had accepted that whenever the Slovenian was on the start line, the rest were fighting for second place.

There is no shame in losing to the best rider of this era, perhaps of all time. But Pidcock and his team seem to be among the very few to put up a fight. That, even more than his excellent form, is what gives him the edge over the rest of the field going into Saturday’s race – and could shape the rest of his Classics campaign.