Tom Pidcock adds extra mountain bike race to schedule, one week before Tour de France

Tom Pidcock will race the Crans Montana round of the Whoop UCI Mountain Bike World Cup, less than a week before starting the Tour de France in Florence, Italy later this month. 

After winning the world title in Glasgow last summer, the reigning Olympic champion has been in fine form on the mountain bike recently. He stormed to yet another victory on the Nové Město XCO World Cup course recently, his fourth win from four straight appearances in the Czech Republic. 

Pidcock faces a hectic summer in which he will look to defend his Olympic gold medal that he won in Tokyo. The 24-year-old will head to the games in Paris straight from riding the Tour de France for Ineos Grenadiers. 

Pidcock told Cycling Weekly last week that he will ride one final mountain bike race before heading to the Tour. 

"I'm also doing Crans Montana, the week before the Tour," he said. 

The men's cross-country race at the UCI World Cup event will take place on 23 June, with the Tour starting six days later on 29 June. 

"I don't train on my mountain bike as much as I should, but [road and mountain bike] are quite interchangeable," Pidcock said. "Of course now, this time of year, I'm doing longer efforts, in preparation for the Tour, more volume. But they all complement each other." 

The Brit's bolstered mountain bike calendar comes as he looks to gain momentum towards the Olympics. 

After outgunning the likes of Nino Schurter in Nové Město, Pidcock embarked on an epic ride back to Andorra the following morning. The Brit flew into Barcelona El Prat airport before he then rode more than 230km, including more than 4,000 metres of elevation, back home. 

Before starting his long ride, Pidcock shared a photo of his Garmin and handlebars on Instagram with the caption "time to ride home" before later sharing another shot of his GPS, complete with his ride data. 

"Love a good adventure," the 24-year-old wrote. The Brit said long rides give him a chance to decompress.

"I rode home from Barcelona airport [after Nové Město], it was almost eight hours," he said. "It's sort of a tradition every spring when I've done some mountain bike I always do a long ride after. It's just enjoyable, and an easy way to get in some training."

Pidcock regularly enjoys long-distance rides after securing mountain bike World Cup wins. Back in 2022, he rode more than 190km on his road bike from Germany to the Czech Republic the day after getting his hands in the air at the Albstadt World Cup round. 

"You can just go and explore, you know," he said. "On a bike you can visit places that you would never ever go in a car."

The men's cross-country mountain bike race at the Olympics will take place on 29 July at Elancourt Hill near Paris. 

Read more about Tom Pidcock's summer schedule in an exclusive interview in Cycling Weekly magazine this Thursday.