“I was more stressed about Tom’s contract than my own!”: Tom Pidcock’s new teammate Rory Townsend on how “maverick” Olympic champ has lifted Q36.5 (and why you shouldn’t drink too much pickle juice)

“I think I was more stressed about Tom’s contract than I was my own,” laughs Rory Townsend, as the former Irish champion reflects on arguably the biggest cycling transfer saga of the past 15 years. And he wasn’t alone. For most of the winter off-season, the cycling gossip pages were dominated by the messy, protracted divorce between Tom Pidcock and the Ineos Grenadiers.

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On the cards for much of 2024, and hastened by the double Olympic champion’s very public last-minute dropping from the Ineos line-up for Il Lombardia, in early December it was finally confirmed that Pidcock had agreed a deal to break his contract with the struggling British squad, with whom he turned pro in 2021, three years early.

Big hitters like Visma-Lease a Bike and Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe were tipped as possible suitors, but Pidcock ultimately opted to step down a level, joining Doug Ryder’s second-tier ProTeam Q36.5 Pro Cycling.

> “2025 is about to get lit”: Tom Pidcock signs three-year deal with second-tier Q36.5 Pro Cycling Team after leaving Ineos Grenadiers – and says he can now make “racing my bike a priority”

The spiritual successor to the Tour de France stage-winning African Dimension Data team, Q36.5’s second-tier status means it is reliant on wildcard invitations to the sport’s biggest events. This situation will, of course, improve with the high-profile presence of the Amstel Gold and Strade Bianche winner, but also ensures that, despite a relatively normal classics campaign secured, there will be no Tour de France in 2025 for Pidcock.

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Not that the multidisciplined Yorkshireman – chasing the racing freedom often denied him within the rigid confines of the Tour-chasing Ineos Grenadiers – will lose too much sleep over his impending July break.

In fact, it’s fair to say that the move has already proved a success. On his Q36.5 debut at the AlUla Tour at the end of January, Pidcock won the race’s two decisive stages and the general classification in convincing fashion, before this week adding another victory on Thursday's second stage of the Vuelta a Andalucia. His new teammates have been firing on all cylinders, too. Sprinter Matteo Moschetti joined the fun by winning the final stage of the AlUla Tour, beating Dylan Groenewegen, while promising Swiss star Fabio Christen won the Vuelta a Murcia last weekend.

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That blistering start to the season means, in the middle of February, Q36.5 have already won as many races (five) as they managed during the entire 2024 season.

And, according to former Irish road race champion Townsend, Pidcock’s arrival at the team has provided a massive boost to a squad harbouring lofty ambitions since its re-establishment two years ago – though he insists the expectations, for both himself and the squad, remain the same.

After almost a decade racing for British domestic and Conti level teams – which featured an Epstein Barr diagnosis, rejections, false dawns, a sports science degree, an emotional Irish championships win in 2022, and a mattress on the floor of a dingy Belgian B&B – Townsend made the leap to the ProTour with Bolton Equities Black Spoke in 2023, before joining Q36.5 last year, a long-awaited step-up the London-based rider describes as a “dream becoming reality” and a “gift I’ll never take for granted”.

However, illness and injury blighted his debut season with the Swiss squad, despite some decent performances and results in one-day races and week-long events, including four top tens at the Tour of Britain, which he started sick, and a first ever crack at Paris-Roubaix.

(Elliot Keen/British Cycling/via SWpix.com)

But with a full season racing at the highest level, as well as an uninterrupted winter’s training, under his belt, Townsend is ready to hit the ground running in 2025, a confidence he’s identified running throughout the squad during their pre-season training camps.

“There’s a great atmosphere in camp with the fresh faces that we’ve added,” the 29-year-old tells the road.cc Podcast, shortly before his first races of the season in Spain.

“It's funny how even just changing the kit, for example, all feels a little bit different. But the obvious thing is what Tom brings as well. All of a sudden, there’s a lot more attention on us.

“In cycling, there’s a strange social hierarchy that exists – the favourites are always at the front and they’re allowed more space by other teams. And I think bringing Tom on board probably gives us a little bit more space, and that can help lift us up. Even if it’s subconscious that we believe that or if it’s genuinely recognised by other teams, I think it will help.”

It may have been the most talked about transfer of the cycling off-season, but how much did Townsend know about Pidcock’s impending arrival?

“I probably knew more than I should,” he laughs. “And it really became something that, because it was completely out of my control, I ended up all the time like, ‘oh, have we heard anything’? I think I was more stressed about Tom’s contract than I was my own! I just knew what a great opportunity it would be.

“So yeah, I knew from quite a way out, but it was still a very complicated situation going on. I think it took a lot of work from Doug and the team, a lot of late nights to get it across the line. But I knew it was on the cards.”

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Reflecting on the reasons behind Pidcock’s decision to call time on his stint at Ineos early, the former Irish champion said: “I think he sees the opportunity to create his own thing here and really leave his mark.

“As an outsider looking in, it seems like Ineos are very systems-based and they almost had a rider that they were trying to fit into their kind of idea of how racing should be, ‘this is how we do things’. Like in any given race, you know how Ineos are going to do it. And with a rider like Tom, personally I just don’t feel they utilised him in the right way.

“I think they’re almost a victim of their own success in a way. They view it as ‘this is how we’ve been successful’, and if it’s not broke, don’t fix it. But the sport has changed massively, there’s no Sky train anymore. And for them, grand tours are more attractive because you can plan and schedule, but the classics – where Tom is brilliant – are more unpredictable.

“You have a guy here who’s a bit of a maverick – you can’t really plan necessarily for the things that Tom can do on a bike. For me, Tom, Mathieu [van der Poel], and Tadej [Pogačar], they’re guys who ride on feel in an old-school way. They can do incredible things on any given day, but they might not fit into the plan for the team. Whereas Tom can come here, and he has more freedom. He can develop this project like the way Alpecin has become such a force with Van der Poel.

“Ineos saw he has the capacity to be a grand tour contender. But he has other aspirations and maybe those two things didn’t align. I wonder if it was a case of trying to fit a square peg in a round hole with him.

“I can’t speak for him, but he can come to a team like ours and we’re perfectly set up to give him the foundation to go after what he wants. It might have looked like a strange decision from the outside, but I wasn’t overly surprising, especially knowing what our team is like on the inside. He’s not going to be losing much from coming to us.”

 

 

 

 

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Apart from his early season wins, what impact has Pidcock – a winner at Amstel Gold and Strade Bianche and on Alpe d’Huez at the Tour de France – had on the second-tier Swiss squad?

“From the training camp, and I knew Tom a little bit beforehand as well, it’s amazing seeing all the success he’s had that he’s a phenomenally driven individual,” Townsend notes.

“And taking that across and putting it here, I think there’s a lot of things we can take from him as a team and adapt to the way Tom does things. And I think that will help bring us all on.”

Townsend representing Ireland at the 2024 European road race championships (Alex Whitehead/SWpix.com)

Not that Pidcock’s arrival has altered the long-term focus and ambitions of Doug Ryder’s team, Townsend points out.

“We didn’t really talk about what impact Tom’s arrival would have on the team,” the 29-year-old says. “The team has high expectations and they’re very hungry to get back up, having been in the WorldTour before as NTT and Dimension Data. And I think the psychology of the team is still rooted in that. That’s how they see themselves.

“And I think it was quite difficult last year. like We weren’t performing. I felt like there was a slight disconnect in the sense of what the team’s expectations were and what the realities of the situation were.

“But the team is run so professionally. There are lots of guys in the peloton who probably look at us and think, ‘I wish we had half of what those guys do’. And that creates an expectation that we want to perform.

“So, I don’t think the expectations from the team side have really changed. The reality is that now we’re in a position where we fulfil those hopes and expectations.”

Elsewhere in the episode, which you can listen to in the podcast player at the top of this story, Townsend also discusses his own personal plans and ambitions for the season, which include a crack at the classics and aiming for that so far elusive Tour of Britain stage success, his brutal day in the break at the Glasgow world championships, those Box Hill Strava KOM conquests – and why you need to properly dilute your pickle juice before downing it during a race…

The road.cc Podcast is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Amazon Music, and if you have an Alexa you can just tell it to play the road.cc Podcast. It’s also embedded further up the page, so you can just press play.