'Worst day ever on the bike' - Tom Pidcock marks comeback with second in Alps opener

Tom Pidcock is no ordinary bike rider. That much has been abundantly clear throughout a career that has seen him toggle seamlessly between disciplines and between all kinds of road races on all kinds of terrains.

It was evident again in Innsbruck on Monday afternoon, where Pidcock placed second behind Tommaso Dati (Ukyo) in the bunch sprint on the opening stage of the Tour of the Alps. It was the Briton’s first race since he suffered knee ligament and bone damage in a horrific crash at the Tour of the Alps, but not even that context could convince him to put an upbeat gloss on his afternoon in Austria.

Pidcock certainly didn’t sugarcoat his thoughts when he wheeled to a halt by the Pinarello-Q36.5 soigneurs on the Rennweg in the centre of Innsbruck. “That was the worst day,” he announced matter-of-factly before seeking directions to the team bus, and he saw little reason to revise that opinion for public consumption shortly afterwards.

“Terrible, awful,” Pidcock told Domestique when asked how his return to competition had gone. “It was like we were going full gas up every climb, it was the worst day ever on the bike.”

Everything is relative in cycling, of course, and plenty in the Tour of the Alps peloton would doubtless trade their best days for a worst day like the one Pidcock professed to have here. On a day that brought the race over some rugged terrain in the hinterland of Innsbruck, after all, he was consistently placed towards the head of the peloton.

When Thymen Arensman (Ineos) launched a surprise offensive in the finale, Pidcock was tucked snugly in the reduced front group that chased him. When Arensman was brought back, Pidcock duly sprinted for the win. 

He didn’t have the punch to come around Dati in the closing metres, but second place in his first race since that Catalunya crash was surely a decent omen for better days to come. Pidcock being Pidcock, he didn’t quite see it that way.

“Yeah, but there’s no sprinters here, so that’s not very difficult, is it?” he said, not in disappointment, but as a simple statement of fact. “I just followed in the wheel. I had no sprint at all.”

For a week or so after Pidcock’s crash on the descent of Collada Sobirana last month, his Pinarello-Q36.5 squad was braced for the possibility that his Spring campaign was already over. 

Victory at Milano-Torino and second place at Milan-Sanremo had augured well for the Ardennes Classics, but manager Doug Ryder told Domestique that the team would take a cautious approach to Pidcock’s return to racing.

His injuries included a hairline fracture to his tibia as well as anterolateral ligament damage in his knee, but once Pidcock was able to resume riding his bike, the swelling quickly dissipated and he began to formulate a plan of attack for Liège-Bastogne-Liège.

On Friday, Pidcock was a surprise addition to the Tour of the Alps start list, and his hope is that the five days of racing in Austria and Italy this week will allow him to rebuild his form ahead of the big rendezvous with Tadej Pogacar, Remco Evenepoel et al in Liège next Sunday. 

Suffering through the opening stage as he did will surely stand him in good stead as he looks towards the weekend, but Pidcock had no truck for such platitudes in the immediate aftermath of the sprint.

“No, no positives,” he said. “The positive is that it can only get better.”