Oh, Pidders

The blockbuster transfer of the men's cycling season is happening after all

Photo Credit: Charly Lopez, ASO

Look, I was as appalled as anyone when Ineos Grenadiers kicked Tom Pidcock off the roster for Il Lombardia. Here, read all about it.

Good Piddance

Ditching the obvious team leader, arguably the biggest star on the entire roster¹ with Geraint Thomas and Egan Bernal in their current condition, and maybe the only guy who had a tactical angle to beat Tadej Pogačar—it’s management malpractice. Doing so at the 11th hour over the objections of a fit rider is a Hall of Fame nose-cutting-for-purposes-of-face-spiting. I’ll go so far as to say it was unprofessional.

What an own goal. As great as Ineos Grenadiers and its precursors have been in stage racing—11 grand tour GC titles by five different riders since 2012, plus a bucketload of other prestigious one-week stage race wins by Wout Poels, Michał Kwiatkowski, Richie Porte, Sergio Henao—they’ve gone oh-fer in the grand tours since Bernal’s Giro win in 2021. And as much noise as Pidcock made about trying to become a GC guy someday, he was far more valuable in the classics. Ineos has just 16 world tour classics wins in its entire history—the last two via Pidcock—and only three monuments.

They need this guy. Badly.

There’s a point at which personalities and priorities clash so badly that a rider—especially one as well-remunerated as Pidders—can become more trouble than he’s worth without either athlete nor team doing anything technically wrong. But it definitely seems like Ineos is in decline—the management brain drain sure looks like rats fleeing a sinking ship—and with fracking tycoon Sir Jim Ratcliffe turning his attention to soccer, that only figures to get worse.²

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Big contract or not, big expectations and profile or not, I get why Pidcock would want out.

But his destination is fascinating, even if it’s been telegraphed for almost two months. Back when I wrote about this for the first time in October, I called the Q36.5 rumor credible for one reason:

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?

Q36.5, with its idiotic name, is not a WorldTour team. It’s not the most notable or talent-stocked or best-resourced ProTour team. I’d argue that with Tudor Pro Cycling signing Julian Alaphilippe and Marc Hirschi for 2025, Q36.5 isn’t even the best Swiss-based team in the men’s second division. They’ve won zero World Tour races since rebranding at the start of 2023, and their top two returning riders are a pair of ancient Italians: climber Gianluca Brambilla and sprinter Giacomo Nizzolo. Going down the list of Q36.5’s best riders, you get to Harm Vanhoucke real quick.

So what the hell is Pidcock doing? Can he win here?

Well, there are advantages to being a big fish in a small pond. Having a rider of Pidcock’s quality would earn Q36.5 invites to most of the races it wants to attend, including at least some of the monuments, and I’d imagine at least one grand tour. At the same time, Q36.5 would not be obligated to attend every World Tour race, by virtue of not competing in the top division. The wild card invite roulette is a dangerous game, but a lot of the teams that have tried to leverage star power into consistent Tour de France or Paris-Roubaix invitations have had an aging leader: Peter Sagan with TotalEnergies, Nairo Quintana with Arkéa-Samsic.

The best parallel is Alpecin-Deceuninck, which only actually became a World Tour team in 2023. But they were getting invites to big classics races as early as 2018, thanks to the allure of cyclocross god Mathieu van der Poel. By the early 2020s they were as much a fixture in the classics as Quick-Step, despite relying on ad hoc invites. It was a recurring take on the Lanterne Rouge podcast at the time that Alpecin-Deceuninck³ actually had nothing to gain by achieving World Tour status, because they raced most of the events they wanted to and none of the ones they didn’t. So they could build a monster sprint and classics team around van der Poel, Jasper Philipsen and Tim Merlier while paying no mind to stage racing.

It’s a good angle to play if you can pull it off, but Pidcock is not van der Poel and Q36.5 is far lower on the pecking order than Alpecin-Deceunick was then.

But there’s always a money angle. Every team has an official bike supplier, as do a few individual stars, and when there’s a conflict, the star rider and team will usually end up on the same sponsorship roll. van der Poel and Canyon, Peter Sagan and Specialized—sometimes the rider’s sponsorship is lucrative enough he can get the team to override all other considerations when sourcing equipment.

Pidcock will continue to ride Pinarello bikes⁴ for his numerous cyclocross and mountain biking outings⁵, but when he hits the road in Q36.5 colors, he’ll ride Scott equipment.

It’s a confusing compromise, especially because Scott has the longer offroad history of the two manufacturers. But Caley Fretz explained it all in an article Monday at Escape Collective. In case you want to know why Q36.5 has such a stupid name, it’s because the team’s title sponsor is a clothing company owned by evil⁶ South African billionaire Ivan Glasenberg. Glasenberg, who made his billions in mining and commodities trading,⁷ also spent some €200 million on a controlling stake in Pinarello in 2023. So now the same guy who owns the team’s title sponsor also owns Pidcock’s bike sponsor…but he bought Pinarello just after Q36.5 signed a three-year supply deal with Scott, a contract the team is apparently honoring.

But after the end of this coming season, I expect Q36.5 to be on Pinarello bikes to match their Pinarello-funded leader. The kind of franchise player contract Pidcock is on often gets at least partially subsidized by the bike sponsor—this is the case for van der Poel now and Sagan in the past. We’re no closer to knowing if this is tenable competitively—make no mistake, we might’ve just watched a future monument winner and/or grand tour contender throw away the prime of his career—but we know how it’s being funded.

1. And the no. 1 boy in English cycling, racing for a British team

2. Just ask the Boston Red Sox how things went for them after John Henry turned his attention to Liverpool. Though things went pretty great for Liverpool, tbh.

3. Or Alpecin-Fenix or Corendon-Circus, or whatever it was called

4. Pinarello has been Ineos Grenadiers’ bike supplier since the team’s founding in 2010

5. Remember, he’s a world champion in the former and a two-time defending Olympic champion in the latter

6. presumably, based on the three words that are about to come next

7. In case you thought I was being unkind calling him evil just now