Made in the Tom Pidcock mold, Adrien Boichis is the to top favourite for the Mountain Bike World Championship
Mountain BikingSunday, 30 August 2026 at 08:36
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Follow us on GoogleFor years, Tom Pidcock was considered the quintessential modern all-around athlete: a world-class mountain biker, successful on the road, and trained at Trinity Racing. Remarkably, Adrien Boichis is following a similar path. The Frenchman is now a WorldTour pro, a world champion in short track, and one of the absolute top favourites for the world title in Olympic cross-country.
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Anyone who has followed Adrien Boichis in recent years can hardly be surprised by his definitive breakthrough in 2026. The 23-year-old Frenchman from Aix-en-Provence has been among the greatest mountain biking talents of his generation since his junior days. In 2021, he became the junior cross-country world champion, and a year later he joined the British team Trinity Racing.
In 2023 in particular, Boichis demonstrated just how high his ceiling was: he became European U23 champion, runner-up in the Olympic cross-country world championships, and won both the XCO (Cross-Country Olympic)and XCC (Cross-Country Short Track) standings in the U23 World Cup. He accomplished all this while still balancing his cycling career with an engineering degree in Nice.
It was precisely that combination of talent and thoughtfulness that defined his early years. Boichis was never just a mountain biker who happened to hop on a road bike every now and then; at Trinity, he began consciously combining both disciplines starting in 2022. He later said that the transition to road racing wasn’t easy at first, but that he became increasingly competitive there starting in 2023.
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Boichis als jong broekie voor Trinity op de mountainbike.
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The Frenchman’s career did not follow a straight upward trajectory. In the spring of 2024, Boichis fell ill during the World Cups in Brazil, and the consequences turned out to be much more serious than initially thought. He had to stop cycling for months and, among other things, saw his chances of competing in the Paris Olympics slip away.
This makes his rise to prominence all the more remarkable. Specialized, which had already been supporting Trinity, brought him onto the Factory Racing team for 2025, while he continued to develop on the road through the Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe development program. In just his second elite World Cup race of 2025, he stood third on the podium in Araxá.
Later that year, he earned several more podium finishes and became the European XCO champion and world XCC champion in the U23 category. In 2026, he took the next step: Boichis became a full-fledged rider for the WorldTour team Red Bull-BORA-hansgrohe and, in between his mountain bike races, finished seventh overall in the Tour de Wallonie, among other achievements.
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Boichis is following the same path as Pidcock
What was still a development project just a few years ago has now become a career at the very highest level in two disciplines. And that’s exactly where the comparison with Tom Pidcock comes to mind. In its early years, Trinity Racing was largely built around the young Brit and subsequently grew into a team where riders could continue to combine different disciplines.
Pidcock combined cyclocross, road racing, and mountain biking, using 2020 as a springboard to the very top of the world: he won the Baby Giro, claimed the U23 mountain bike world title, and then joined INEOS Grenadiers, immediately winning Olympic gold in mountain biking in his first WorldTour season.
Boichis’s career has featured a striking number of similar elements. He, too, joined Trinity as a world champion from the junior ranks, developed his road racing program alongside his mountain biking career, and subsequently found a way to continue pursuing his off-road ambitions even after making the switch to a WorldTour team.
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Tom Pidcock
Ex-Trinity duo Boichis and Pidcock are the favorites for the Mountain Bike World Championships
The connection isn’t just superficial. When Boichis was explicitly asked about Pidcock’s path in 2023, he called the Brit one of his heroes: Pidcock’s career inspired him to dream, the Frenchman said, though he was determined to follow his own path. That path of his has now brought him to Val di Sole as one of the clear favorites for the world title in Sunday’s Cross Country race.
Boichis is second in the XCO World Cup standings and leads the XCC standings, but his results over the past few months, in particular, speak for themselves. In 2026, he won the XCO World Cup races in Leogang and Pal Arinsal, finished second in Lenzerheide and third in La Thuile, and came back even stronger after the summer break.
In Les Gets last weekend, he first won the short track race and then, two days later, beat Mathieu van der Poel in the XCO race, definitively pulling away from the Dutchman on the final lap. A week later, he confirmed his form at the World Championships by immediately claiming the elite world title in the short track as well. This undoubtedly makes him the favorite for Sunday.
Still, the competition is exceptional: World Cup leader Luca Martin is on the starting line, defending champion Alan Hatherly is there, Van der Poel is still chasing that elusive rainbow jersey, and Pidcock won his only XCO World Cup race of the year in Nové Město. This also means that the rivalry with Pidcock will reach an almost perfect climax on Sunday: the rider who once served as a role model at Trinity is now a direct contender for the rainbow jersey.
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Bram van der PloegEditor-in-chief
Bram van der Ploeg (35) is the proud founder of In de Leiderstrui, IDL Pro Cycling's parent site, launched in 2018. Finally, he could create stories about the sport he had followed since childhood. He is the editor-in-chief on paper, but prefers to be with his recorder next to a rider, a team bus, or in the mud at a cyclocross race. Every year, from February to the end of May, Bram follows the entire Italian cycling season, from the Trofeo Laigueglia to the Giro d'Italia, with the grand finale in October in Lombardy. During that time, he lives in Tuscany, where he has since come to call Italy his 'home'.
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Latest Comments
- - Not sure I buy the “nobody’s fault” line entirely. Course safety has to be better. A world champ face-planting on a stray stone isn’t just bad luck. Where were the motos and commissaires?julien29-08-2026
- - Matxin handled that interview with class. No blame game, just honesty. Cycling’s brutal — one second you’re flying, next you’re in an ambulance. Ánimo Tadej, vuelve fuerte.velodromevirtuoso129-08-2026
- - Quick question: when they said a rock on the road caused it near the finish, isn’t the run-in supposed to be swept by organisers? How common is that this late in a stage?cadencekingm29-08-2026
- - Gutted for Pogi. Shoulder injuries can be tricky — if it’s AC joint or collarbone, Worlds might be tight. Fingers crossed it’s just heavy contusions and those eyebrow stitches are minor.jeremya29-08-2026
- - Brutal day. You could see the whole UAE train soft-pedalling after the crash — pure respect to ride in as a group behind Coquard by 11’. Says a lot about team unity.samanthak29-08-2026
- - Love Brennan’s candour though. Two stage wins already, he’s earned the right to speak. Reset, recover, and pick a cleaner run-in later in the week. Go on lad!cadencekingm29-08-2026
- - Bit rich to call others “superheroes” when you also dive for gaps in sprints. Feels like excuses after missing the wheel. Own the positioning error—Laporte and WvA can’t do everything.patriciaw29-08-2026
- - Pogacar down, DNFs before the start, pile-up in the last km… safety protocols need a look. Barriers and road furniture on these Spanish urban finishes are brutal. UCI y la organización, por favor, más seguridad.bikebuffj29-08-2026
- - Can someone explain what “pedaling at 160 watts” means in this context? Is that like super easy pace for these guys? Trying to understand why there were still so many crashes if it was “easy.”davidm29-08-2026
- - Wild stage. Brennan’s quotes hit hard but he’s not wrong—finale was a bowling alley. Tenth after all that chaos isn’t catastrophic, but Visma’s train never properly formed once he lost Laporte’s wheel.sprocketspiny29-08-2026
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