Good Piddance
Ineos embarrasses itself, and its star rider, at the last race of the season
So I’ll start by saying this: It’s never a good sign when a star athlete is doing passive-aggressive Instagram posts the day before a big event.
I guess I should recap the monument that happened this weekend. Tadej Pogačar attacked from almost 50 kilometers out and won Il Lombardia by more than three minutes. Just like everyone expected. Remco Evenepoel finished second, Giulio Ciccone third. Pogačar wraps up the best individual season in the modern history of the sport. Hosannah in the highest. But I feel like I’ve written about this six or seven times by now, so let’s take a look at the sideshow.
On Friday, I published an Il Lombardia preview that named Tom Pidcock, 25, of Ineos Grenadiers, as one of the few riders (perhaps the only rider) who stood a chance of upsetting the world champion. Pidcock is an alarmingly quick descender, and I figured that with so many big climbs so close to the end of the race, he had a remote chance of hanging with Pogačar on the way up the hill and then generating some separation on the way down.
I’ve learned this lesson a few times this season, but when you write a post on Thursday night to run on Friday, previewing a race that happens on Saturday or Sunday, you’re occasionally going to be working with incomplete information. As of Thursday, Pidcock was in line to start for Ineos. By Friday afternoon, he was on Instagram.
Just as things were on the up after a turbulent end to the year I am deselected for Lombardia tomorrow. I am in great shape and was really looking forwarded1 to it! Good luck to the boys, I guess off season starts early. Thanks for everyone’s support even in the tough times 👊
So this is clearly not an injury. Pidcock wanted to race, and Ineos management pulled the rug out from under him at the last minute. Which is wild! There was nobody else on that team capable of so much as putting a scare into Pogačar, and sure enough, the best Ineos finisher on the day was Thyman Arensman in 15th.
They left Pidcock out, it seems, because of spite. And Ineos assistant DS Zak2 Dempster did little to clarify the situation with some bizarre comments to Cyclingnews: “Obviously, I read the press too, you know? And it's a strange occurrence before a monument. I don't have any more information, so it's really difficult for me to comment.” Dempster also said that it was not a sporting decision but “a management decision,” referred to management as “they,” and said more than once that he didn’t have any more information. So whoever pulled Pidcock at the 11th hour—in embarrassing fashion, I might add—came pretty far up the food chain. Possibly outside the sporting structure of the team.
Now, Pidders has done some upsetting of the apple cart here. I have to imagine that this would be going down differently if he’d developed into a grand tour contender the way everyone had hoped. But his biggest victories since joining Ineos have come in non-road racing disciplines. He’s had one big road racing victory per year—Brabantse Pijl in 2021, the Alpe d’Huez stage of the Tour de France in 2022, Strade Bianche in 2023 and Amstel Gold in 2024—but he’s been a virtual nonfactor as a GC rider, even by the standard of winning one-week stage races and coming in the top 10 at grand tours.
And for the past six weeks, from Ineos’s perspective, Pidcock has been standing outside the tent pissing in. At the Tour of Britain, he gave an interview to the Belgian press in which he lit his team up. Here’s the money quote:
“Yes, it is true that there are currently a number of issues within the team that I have to deal with. And to be honest, they don’t help me to perform at my best. I have to think about a lot more than just performance-related things at the moment. And that means that the focus on the things that are really important, namely racing, is not ideal.”
That’s a downright incendiary thing to say about one’s own team, particularly about Ineos as an Englishman. But it’s also the same thing everyone who’s left Ineos in the past few years has said on their way out, in addition to being obvious to anyone who’s old enough to remember when the former Sky team won stage races at will. Now, they’ve won one World Tour stage race in the past 24 months, and zero grand tours since 2021. Striking British talents like Pidcock and Ethan Hayter—the generation of riders inspired by Sky’s initial run of success—have either regressed or failed to develop.
Pidcock might have been impolitic, but he’s right.
Ineos lifer Geraint Thomas weighed in from Eurosport’s Instagram account. Thomas, a 38-year-old Tour de France winner, five-time grand tour podium finisher, and two-time Olympic gold medalist, is too old and too highly decorated to have much give-a-shit left in his tank, so he spoke his mind. He didn’t seem particularly sympathetic to the party line, but he alluded to unhelpful “people who are around Tom.”
All the while, rumors have been swirling that Pidcock, who is under contract until 2027, has been looking for a lifeboat. The destination: Swiss second-division squad Q36.5 Pro Cycling Team.
I’m only inclined to believe this rumor because it’s too weird to make up. Like, it’s plausible that he’d be trying to leave a team that he thinks is underachieving. But if that were true, why wouldn’t he be looking for a better-resourced, more ambitious outfit? If the rumor were Pidcock-to-UAE or Pidcock-to-Alpecin-Deceuninck or even Pidcock-to-EF or something like that, I’d think “OK, maybe that’s made up from pure speculation.” But why would he want to go to Q36.5?
There are three reasons for Pidcock not to want to go there:
It’s the dumbest team name imaginable. It sounds like one-third of a radio station that plays soft rock and adult contemporary. Here on Q36.5, we guarantee you’ll hear “Superman” by Five for Fighting at least once an hour. We’re the no. 1 music station in Hazelton, Pennsylvania, because we play what you want to hear. I bet Q36.5 carries Delilah’s show on syndication, though. Everyone loves Delilah.3
Q36.5 not a World Tour team, which means it would not get automatic bids for the big races—anything World Tour-level, really, but most notably the grand tours and monuments. Now, a name as big as Pidcock will generate a lot of attention and invites; this is how things worked for Alpecin-Deceuninck when Mathieu van der Poel was first emerging as a road racer and the team was still only on the ProTeam level. But this year, Q36.5 got invited to the cobbled monuments, the warmup races for Il Lombardia, and the first two-thirds of Ardennes Week. But they were not at Il Lombardia or Liège-Bastogne-Liège proper, nor at any of the grand tours.
Buying Pidcock out of three years’ worth of Ineos contract is going to be expensive, to say nothing of actually paying the man. And Q36.5 does not seem to be flush with cash4 at the moment. They just shut down their developmental squad, which isn’t something you do when you’ve got millions of dollars lying around.
I’ve got no problem believing Ineos and Pidcock are sick of each other. And while Pidcock’s comments might have embarrassed his bosses, leaving him out of the Il Lombardia squad is some wild-ass behavior from people who are supposed to be the adults in the room. Based on what’s out there now,5 this looks like pure spite. It is indeed management’s prerogative to set the lineup however they wish, but dropping Pidcock this late with no explanation is embarrassing. It’s unprofessional. Of course, it’s not unheard-of—Soudal-Quick Step boss Patrick Lefevere alienates and attempts to humiliate a better rider than Pidcock about once every six months.
But if Pidcock weren’t looking for an exit before, he certainly should now.
I guess you don’t have to learn to spell if you’ve got two Olympic gold medals and a world cyclocross title.
Short for Zakkari. Australians have wild names.
In preparation for this joke, I googled to make sure Delilah is still on the air, which she is, and she’s only 64! That’s wild, she sounded 64 when I was listening to the radio 20 years ago. Also, according to Wikipedia she’s been married four times and has had 15 children, including 11 adopted children. That’s a lot of kids!
Did I subconsciously use that phrase because Q36.5 reminds me of Entertainment 720? Man, I hated every second Jean-Ralphio was on screen, except for the “flush with cash” line delivery. That was absolutely hysterical.
Like, I’ll take this all back if it comes out next week that Pidcock strangled and ate a hitchhiker last Thursday night