Jaimie Monahan

Tom Pidcock isn’t riding his bike. This is odd, because for the past 18 years, since swinging a short leg across his first two-wheeler, he’s barely been off it. Blame his racing- cyclist dad, who got him rolling on the footpaths around Herne Hill Velodrome in south-east London. Blame his ambition, which at the age of 10 sparked a desire to become a pro cyclist. You could also blame his mum, who tied toddler Tom’s feet to his pedals to help him ride. Almost two decades on, ahead of his first season as a senior pro with INEOS Grenadiers, Pidcock is tied to his bike more than ever. But not today.

“It was biblical this morning,” he says, perched at the table of his part-time racing home in Belgium and referencing the day’s early downpour. “It’s better now, though. I’ve just been out to the shops.” If this sounds impossibly ordinary for one of the brightest cycling prospects on the planet, it really shouldn’t, because Pidcock hails from Yorkshire – that part of northern England so proudly down-toearth it’s almost subterranean. Cycling on the hard hills of the Yorkshire Dales and the bleak North York Moors builds strength, toughness, and a resilience to bitter weather. What Yorkshire lacks in alpine scale, it compensates in grit – territory not unlike the sparse acreage beyond Pidcock’s Belgian base, where roads made of cobbles, and Sunday crowds for the cyclocross races, are woven into local lore.

As we speak, at just after 4pm on a Wednesday in December, it’s almost dark and deep-winter cold outside. The hardiest pro would be forgiven for not wanting to ride into its grip for five, six, seven hours… but only if the training schedule permits respite. For these are the days of dour kilometres that feed the flashing colours of the spring classics and the summer peloton; when the gloom has gone and racing butterflies emerge from their kit-layered cocoons.

“Yeah, there are days when none of it is good, none of it is nice, and you don’t want to do it,” Pidcock reflects, casting his gaze through a window into the creeping gloom. “But that’s just part of it. You have to learn to manage your emotions and almost try not to have them. Just do your job. And it doesn’t matter if it’s not your best ride or it’s not your best efforts, or whatever. If you do them, that’s what counts.”

He speaks with a veteran’s wisdom. Yet Pidcock – 157cm and 58kg of cycling assassin – is still only 21, looking ahead to a first year on the road-racing pro

Chasing glory: Pidcock (number 61) competes at the Cyclocross World Cup in Hoogerheide, Netherlands, in January 2020 – he finished in seventh place