Race Ramblings: Pidders! Pidders! Pidders! Pidders! Pidders!

Pidderspalooza finally arrived on Sunday at Gavere, we just had to wait for a few weeks for Tom Pidcock to live up to the hype.

Living up to the hype, is difficult.

Receiving hype is, no doubt, a form of flattery and respect. After all, you have to be good enough and achieve some things for people to expect more and better things from you. At the same, the hyped are usually expected to achieve greater things than they have in the past, and well, that’s hard!

During the past month of the cyclocross season, such appeared to be the case for Tom “Pidders” Pidcock. Pidcock had a solid season racing cyclocross as an Elite last year, with his season reaching a crescendo on a second-place finish at Swiss Worlds. He followed up that result with a solid, multi-disciplinary summer that included a GC title in the Baby Giro and the U23 and eMTB World Championships earlier this fall.

We were so excited about Pidcock’s return to cyclocross at World Cup Tabor that we deemed it Pidderspalooza. A celebration of music, community, British accents, and Tom Pidcock racing cyclocross.

The excitement surrounding Pidcock is certainly due in part to the fact he is an exciting, dynamic bike racer who excels across disciplines and in part to him hailing from Great Britain and thus having a chance at breaking the Belgian and Dutch stranglehold on Elite Men’s cyclocross. But as I wrote in the Pidderspalooza blog post over at cxhairs.com, we were hyping Pidderspalooza because he is seen as one of, if perhaps the only, rider who can stop the Mathieu van der Poel juggernaut.

It is against that backdrop that Pidderspalooza, that World Cup Tabor race, was a massive disappointment. Pidcock finished 17th, and the only memorable moment from the race for him was taking a big flop in Pandora’s Swale.

After Sunday’s race at Gavere, Pidcock acknowledged that Pidderspalooza was a Woodstock ‘99ian bomb. “After Tabor, I think the important thing I told myself is, ‘No one will remember this if you get a result later on.’ Maybe now everyone can forget about that.”

It got left on the cutting room floor of the Race Ramblings following Saturday’s races in Antwerp, but Pidcock rode really well in the sands of Scheldecross, finishing third behind Van der Poel and Eli Iserbyt. That 3rd-place finish was overshadowed by the battle at the front, but it showed another big step forward for Pidders, who had improved his results from 17th to 9th and now to 3rd in the first 3 races since his return.

During the Media Pit podcast, we have talked a lot about the importance of racing to win in cyclocross, and I think we have settled on the conclusion that to win a cyclocross race, you have to be assertive and force others to react to what you’re doing. Sure, ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN IN CYCLOCROSS, but 19 times out of 20, playing for 2nd is going to lead to you finishing … 2nd.

One thing I really like about watching Pidders race cyclocross is he is a dynamic racer who understands you don’t win by playing for second. He is technically gifted, strong, proficient at climbing, and aggressive. Because he is confident in his fitness and bike handling, he is willing to take risks and make big moves. And when you’re racing against one of the sport’s all-time greats, even if it is just his second race of this bizarre season, you have to make big moves if you want to win.

Those who had tickets for the first Pidderspalooza may have left the venue disappointed, but those willing to buy tickets for the underhyped follow-up, Pidderspalooza 2, well they saw one heckuva show on Sunday.

After slow starts in his first few races, Pidcock got off to a good jump off the second row, slotting into 8th position after the holeshot. Not content to be content, he started picking off spots. He was up to 6th after the first downhill dismount section. Then it was up to 4th after Pit 1. IDK about the reader, but at this point, my Pidders-dar started pinging at about this point.

It was when Quinten Hermans got a small gap on everyone that it became clear Pidders came to play. The British rider sprinted past Van der Poel and then jammed the inside of a tight corner to pass Corne van Kessel and move up into second. Our mainest man on the GCN mic, JPow, took notice as well, exclaiming, “Pidcock looks like he’s got the fight in him today. He’s looking very spritely here at the front.” Fight, he would, indeed.

If you thought Pidders would be content to sit in, oh no, no no no. He soon jumped past Hermans on the flat section along the pond before leading the way into the first climb. Then on the climb, he gapped Hermans, MvdP, and everyone else. It was only 7 and half minutes into the race, and Pidcock’s lead was only 5 seconds, but it was clear Pidders was going to make Van der Poel work for his 17th-straight win.

After the race, Pidcock talked about the climb and how he was able to take advantage of the section. “The second part of the climb I thought I was good,” he said. “The first part, in the mud, I was not so good, but in the second part where it got a bit less steep, I was stronger.”

He also talked about his fast start to the race. “The past few years I’ve been bad at the starts, so I’ve been working on them and trying to improve there. I knew if I could do a good first lap and not already be in the red after one lap, then I’d have a lot more for the finish. I’ve been training hard, and now it paid off.”

Pidders wasted little time getting to the front on Sunday. Photo: Yefrifotos

Go to enough festivals, and you are bound to run into a time where skies start getting a little dark, lightning starts flashing far off in the distance, and you start worrying if you’re not going to get to see the headlining act you stood in a field for 4 hours waiting to see. Sunday’s version of Pidderspalooza was not without that ominous moment.

After Iserbyt gave Van der Poel everything he could muster on Saturday at Scheldecross, there was some sense that perhaps Sunday’s big challenger would be Toon Aerts. Aerts has really struggled to regain the tip-top form he showed in October, but at the start of Sunday’s race, he kind of looked like a man reborn. Aerts made the lead group as the top Belgian and put in work in Lap 3.

While Aerts was working, Pidders was flagging a bit. Following Pit 2, Pidders faded back a few bike lengths and for a hot second, it looked like the British phenom may have been the victim of an overexuberant fast start. It happened again in Lap 4 when Van der Poel took the lead up the big climb to Pit 2 and Pidders struggled to keep pace. Hills are often the great equalizer in cyclocross, with small gaps at the top of a climb turning into massive margins on the flip side, so for those waiting for that big Pidders guitar solo, it was a moment of peril, for sure.

If anything has been different about Van der Poel’s two races this weekend versus previous years, in my opinion, it is that he was never able to make his big Van der Poelian 5-minute all-out, soul-crushing assaults. With two relatively long, flat sections following Pit 2, it seemed the perfect place for Van der Poel to put in a little snap and make a big VO2 effort. Perhaps because he is still getting back in the swing of things, no big attack came, and halfway into the 8-lap race, Pidders was able to make contact and reattach to the lead group of 3.

Why is it important to ride at the front and put pressure on a rider who is ostensibly your better? At the beginning of Lap 6, Pidcock took the lead again and led the way through the muddy descents and dismounts on the hilltop portion of the course. The corner wasn’t anything special, but with Pidcock in the lead, Van der Poel’s wheel slipped out and he appeared to be in the wrong gear as he tried to right the ship and get back up to speed. Instead of getting caught up behind the Champ after a brief slowdown, Pidcock now had a legit gap. That gap grew to 14 seconds with 2 laps to go.

If the roles were reversed, if Van der Poel had a 14-second lead with 2 to go, most fans would likely enter the ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN IN CYCLOCROSS zone. (This is what announcers usually start saying in the last lap of a race when a rider has a massive lead. 19 out of 20 races, it’s a polite way of saying, “This race is over.”) However, with Mathieu van der Poel, winner of 50 of his last 51 races, it was only fair to say the race was anything but over.

I don’t know if there was an exact IT’S HAPPENING moment where we knew Van der Poel had no magic for the afternoon, but Pidders did not relent for the last 2 laps of racing. Maybe it was when the camera panned the length of Pit 1 after Pidcock passed and Van der Poel was still not in sight? Perhaps after Pidcock cleared the ensuing bouncy house descent (h/t to Bill for that one) cleanly? Whenever it was, folks:

If cyclocross nation was maybe a bit shocked by that hour in Gavere, Pidcock himself was as well. “To be honest I don’t know what to say. I think today I came of age,” he said.

Tom Pidcock shocked the cyclocross world, and maybe even himself, at Gavere. Photo: Yefrifotos.

As we have said many times before, nothing in cyclocross is guaranteed. Maybe with a week of racing in his legs, Mathieu van der Poel will start ripping off wins in Van der Poelian fashion in the coming weeks. Maybe this will be the best result of Tom Pidcock’s season. Or maybe, it is a sign that the hype was well-placed and Piddersaplooza was a thing, just perhaps a thing that came a few weeks later than expected.

No matter what happens, Sunday was a special day of bike racing, and yes Tom, don’t worry, we are all more than willing to put Tabor in the past. Consider it forgotten.