Tom Pidcock on chronic knee pain and a special mindset for the Tour de France: 'There is no better place'

Tom Pidcock will return to the Tour de France this year, and expectations are high for the 26-year-old Brit from Pinarello-Q36.5. After finishing third in the Vuelta a España in 2025, a strong general classification result in the Tour looks very realistic, but Pidcock is still approaching July’s race in a slightly different way.

In the podcast Frodeno Going Mental, Pidcock gives a fascinating insight over the course of nearly an hour, especially into his mental approach. His hard head helped him become an Olympic and European mountain bike champion twice, while he also became world champion on the mountain bike and in cyclocross.

Raised in Leeds, Pidcock was always surrounded by well-known elite athletes, which gave him an early idea of what hard work really means. “I’ve been lucky enough to see that up close.”

Hard work also involves taking risks, such as when Pidcock broke his collarbone in training in June 2021. Yet just six weeks later he was Olympic mountain bike champion in Tokyo. “I knew how hard I had worked to be in shape, and every day that I would not be riding, I would lose fitness.”

So eight days after the crash, Pidcock was back on the bike, with a plate in his collarbone. “I accepted how it was and I was lucky with the crash. I was not angry, that is just a waste of energy. From the operation onwards, the work started again.”

That is where the seed for the mindset he will take into the upcoming Tour de France is planted. Pidcock also mentioned the waste of energy theme recently when he crashed heavily in the Volta a Catalunya. A few weeks later, he was already racing again in the Tour of the Alps.

“I hate waste, whether it is time or energy,” Pidcock said. “If you are stressed or worried about things that have not even happened yet, that is a waste of energy. If I come under time pressure, I only work harder. Then every effort counts, and that gets more out of me.”

That also stems from an injury he deals with day in, day out. “I think not many people know this, but I have chronic pain in my left knee. When I joined INEOS, I was not allowed to use the shoes I was using at the time. I tested different shoes and quite quickly had knee pain. We pushed that far too much, and I raced through the pain.”

“The day after my very first race as a WorldTour pro — the three-day Tour des Alpes Maritimes et du Var — I did an easy training ride and the power balance between both legs was something like 70-30. I should have sorted out the knee pain then, but we carried on, and because of that I now have chronic pain, probably for the rest of my career.”

The injury he sustained at INEOS opened Pidcock’s eyes for good. “It was a mistake we made, you always have to take time for certain things.” Even so, Pidcock has kept winning in several disciplines in recent years.

“My motivation comes from having fun,” he says. And that is exactly why Pidcock will not head into the Tour de France with one fixed target. Although he may privately believe he can ride for the general classification in July, he does not say it out loud.

Not out of fear, but because he has a different mindset. “The Tour de France is so intense, the spotlight and the media pressure, and the questions you get every day. If it is not going well, it is miserable. But it is the biggest and coolest race in the world, so if it is going well, there is no better place.”

“This year I am going in without expectations, I just want to race and have fun. The rest will follow. I am not going to say I want to win a stage or make the podium, because then there is nothing to fail at. If all you can do is lose, everything goes wrong.”

Author: David Bavin-Hobbs - [email protected]