Tom Pidcock exclusive: Inside the remarkable recovery from his horror crash, and why he's still targeting Liège-Bastogne-Liège

Pidcock will ride the Tour of the Alps next week in preparation for Liège-Bastogne-Liège on April 26 Marco Bertorello/Getty Images Share articleClarity comes quickly at 60kph. Tom Pidcock knew instantly that he was not going to make the corner. “I saw a fencing barrier, but I decided not to go for that because I thought: ‘I’m going to go flying down the mountain into god knows what’,” says Pidcock. “So instead I aimed for a tree — it wasn’t much more than a few branches really. “I landed, and just remember feeling like my arm couldn’t move. My leg was dead. And I was thinking that nobody else had crashed. I was alone down this hill, I didn’t know what I’d hurt because everything was hurting and I couldn’t move. And I didn’t know how long I was going to be down here for.” The crash, on March 27, put Pidcock out of the Volta a Catalunya. Later, writing on social media, he would describe himself as “very lucky” — that the expert descender had used up one of his nine lives. “Luckily, because of the way I had landed, I could send on the radio that I’d gone off, but the team car had already gone a kilometre down the road,” he says. “And so after a few minutes, which felt like half an hour, I was able to move. And then I climbed out.” Pidcock’s injuries to his right knee were extensive. Scans would reveal extensive bone bruising, stress fractures to the tibia, damage to the anterolateral ligament (ALL), grade two MCL damage, an LCL sprain, and a deluge of fluid inside the joint. And yet somehow, three weeks later, the Briton is back riding. Having initially feared missing the majority of the summer, the 27-year-old will start the five-day Tour of the Alps on Monday before, if all goes to plan, entering his second Monument of the season, Liège-Bastogne-Liège, next Sunday. This is the inside story of his recovery. Pidcock had been flying. Even in a career which includes two Olympic gold medals on the mountain bike, victories at Strade Bianche and Amstel Gold, and a Tour de France win atop Alpe d’Huez, his early-season appearances suggested career-best form. Having finished third overall at the Vuelta a Espana last autumn during his first season at Pinarello-Q36.5, an off-season in Chile looks to have helped him take another step again. Six days before crashing, he lost out by half a wheel to Tadej Pogačar at Milan-Sanremo, in one of the most thrilling Monument races of the decade, staying with the Slovenian’s brutal attacks over the Cipressa and Poggio before losing in a sprint. Winner at Milan-Torino the week before that, and sitting second overall in the Volta a Catalunya, Pidcock was one of the peloton’s form riders. 🔥 The decisive move from Pidcock to win his first #MilanoTorino @CA_Ita 👀 Follow #MilanoTorino @CA_Ita on Rai (🇮🇹) and on Eurosport (🌐) pic.twitter.com/qCtW81PLNp — Milano-Torino (@MiTo1876) March 18, 2026 “I think it’s partly why I crashed, because I was going so well,” he tells The Athletic from his home in Andorra. “I was a little bit too complacent. That stage was the first day in proper mountains of the year, and I was feeling really good. “Everyone was descending really nervously, pretty badly, all day. So I was leaving a gap to do my own pace, have a drink, have a gel. You know, when everyone starts stressing, I think that if I can be calm, it helps everyone keep calm behind me, we can just get down the descent safely without everybody racing for position and needing to be at the front for the final climb of the day. “And everything just all at once went wrong. I misjudged the speed, I tried to slow down and then skidded, lost my balance. I tried to knock off some speed and go on the grass — and just ended up flying off the road. “It was a really weird crash that probably shouldn’t have happened, but I was just maybe a bit too relaxed.” Known as the one of the world’s best descenders — his descent of Alpe D’Huez in the 2022 Tour de France went viral — this was just the second major downhill crash of his career. Somehow, having lain motionless in the woods moments before, Pidcock remounted his bike and finished the stage. “Actually, my legs didn’t feel that bad, it was my hand, which is still bruised, and my elbow and shoulder,” he explains. “They were the things that really hurt. And I thought: ‘There’s no way that this is right.’ But I thought that at least if I finish the stage, I have options to keep racing with a hurting arm. “And it turned out actually that it was alright — but my knee had quite serious damage to it. The next day, it swelled up like a balloon.” Having spent the evening after the crash in hospital, the initial scans filled him with worry. Initially, the plans for his 2026 season had revolved around the Ardennes Classics and the Tour de France. Now, given the structural damage to his knee, Pidcock feared both could be off the table. “The initial scans were far worse than what showed after a few days. They say it’s like a Picasso painting when you first do an MRI after a crash, you have to wait a few days until it calms down. “I went to see a specialist in Barcelona, and he was asking about my race programme for the whole summer. He really thought it was going to be more serious because of the ligament damage — the MCL that I tore, if that snaps, you can’t do anything — but as it was, you just have to wait for it to get better.” It was a strange sensation for Pidcock, mentally as well as physically. Suddenly, from the cut and thrust of a professional peloton, he was back in Andorra, not knowing when he would return to the road. “I don’t like doing nothing, it’s difficult,” he says. “We tried to get back on the bike to spin my legs after a week or so and it kind of made it worse. I was just thinking: ‘You’re not in control’. “In reality, I’m going to be back racing after three, four weeks, it wasn’t the end of the world — but I had a new perspective on what it’s like to get properly injured. When I broke my collarbone, I was running on the road again after five days, so that was easy.” A post shared by ᵀᴼᴹ ᴾᴵᴰᶜᴼᶜᴷ (@tompidcock) He tried to find odd tasks to fill the time — completing a Lego replica of Star Wars’ Millennium Falcon, and posting chores on Instagram. One afternoon was spent folding and tidying him and his partner’s collection of shopping bags. “I bought another Lego but I can’t face starting it,” Pidcock says. Improvements came quickly after the fluid was drained from Pidcock’s knee, relieving the pressure on his MCL ligament: “It’s all gooey blood they were sucking out with the needle — it’s not a nice feeling.” Internal knee damage is a relatively unusual injury for a cyclist — who are more accustomed to impact injuries such as broken bones. “The hairline fractures didn’t actually cause me that much trouble. We waited two days after draining the knee, and it actually went really well from there. The pain improved every day, the swelling went down. “It’s not really a cyclist’s injury, but it’s also lucky that I’m a cyclist. The pedalling motion is fine, but twisting, like in other sports, would have been more of an issue.” While recovering, he watched the Monuments as he anxiously awaited his own return. The day after Wout van Aert’s win at Paris-Roubaix, a summit was held with Q36.5’s staff. Pidcock was given the green light to return — but rather than ride Brabantse Pijl and La Flèche Wallonne, as initially planned, he would enter the Tour of the Alps, before a one-day turnaround to race Liège-Bastogne-Liège, La Doyenne, the oldest of the Classics. “(The Tour of the Alps) is a good opportunity now to do another race with some big climbs,” says Pidcock. “The more races like that I do, the more it’ll bring me on as a rider looking towards Grand Tours and performing in the mountains. “I think it’ll also be a bit of a kick in the arse to get in good shape for Liège. It might not work, I might be completely knackered, but there’s nothing to lose.” He will take the Tour of the Alps, which runs from Monday to Friday, day-by-day, but the aim is to complete the race before returning to Belgium for Liège-Bastogne-Liège, should his body stand up to the rigours. Is Pidcock hopeful that some of his shape will have maintained throughout his injury? “There’s a lot of unknowns. I feel actually pretty good in training, but that’s only one side of the story. You know, maybe the rest did me good, but when you have that amount of time off, because we normally train so much, it quickly falls away. But also, the reason why we’re doing a race is because I actually feel better than we thought.” Pidcock’s physiotherapist, Remi Mobed, is a complex injury rehabilitation specialist who has worked with the rider for the past five years. “He’s a remarkable athlete to work with,” Mobed explains. “With this injury particularly, his recovery has been quite astonishing from both a clinical and human performance perspective. The expected rehab time, when he first suffered the injury, was eight weeks. “But Tom’s mindset allowed us to push the boundaries of that traditional rehab timeline. There were clinical markers that Tom needed to achieve before progressing through every stage — not arbitrary checkpoints, but indicators of tissue healing, strength, and functional readiness. “Tom consistently met these — and more often, he exceeded every one of them. It’s a huge testament to his resilience and work ethic — his grit and professionalism were the driving force behind an exceptional recovery.” But after such a high-speed crash on a descent, as multiple riders have discovered over the years, it can often be the mental side which is slower to return. For Pidcock, who wields his downhill abilities as a weapon, any hesitations would severely clip his wings. “I think I haven’t felt any effects from this one, mainly because it was a misjudgement,” he says, after thinking. “I don’t feel any PTSD from it. “When I crashed on the descent in (Le Tour de) L’Avenir (the junior Tour de France), it took me years to feel confident again descending in the rain down narrow mountain roads with walls on the other side. But this one didn’t affect me too much, to be honest.” That said, he has spent time since the crash thinking about other, real possibilities — that having flown off the edge of the mountain, he was lucky to find a tree to stop him falling further down the ravine. In June 2024, Bahrain Victorious rider Gino Mader was killed after crashing on a high-speed descent during the Tour de Suisse. Three months later, his fellow Swiss rider, 18-year-old Muriel Furrer, died from head injuries during the junior World Championships in her home city of Zurich. After leaving the road, like Pidcock, neither her team nor race officials realized she had crashed — and she was not reached by medics for almost 90 minutes. “I think it’s very easy to forget how vulnerable we are,” says Pidcock. “Even though there’s cars and motorbikes around us, television helicopters, I was still lying there and nobody knew. “Ben O’Connor and George Bennett saw me go off and told their team cars, but George had said that it was a Jayco or Astana rider because they just saw a blue bike. Ben O’Connor knew that it was me. But if I was unconscious, nobody would have known. “Kurt and Alex (Bogaerts and Sans Vega, Q36.5’s directeur sportifs) were in the car, and one heard that I was crashed and off the road, while the other thought I was still in front. Even when I came up to the road, another rider passed but they were kind of busy and didn’t even acknowledge me; they texted later to say they didn’t realize what had happened. “But it is scary to think what the consequences could have been.” Senior officials at the UCI, cycling’s governing body, have pushed in recent years to remove race radios — claiming they leave the sport vulnerable to online betting, harm exciting racing, and can overwhelm riders with information. The majority of cycling’s other stakeholders disagree — with Pidcock’s crash an example of their ongoing usefulness. “If there were no radios…” says Pidcock, trailing off. “If you think about it, in the majority of situations I can see the argument for taking them away. But on the safety side, you can help improve safety with technology. “I’m not one for going overboard and wrapping everything in cotton wool. What we do is dangerous, that’s why it’s a sport and why it’s exciting. You have to take risks to win, we all accept that. But radios help improve safety.” It is two days before the Tour of the Alps, and Pidcock is making his final preparations to head to Austria. “When I started training I felt good,” he says. “Then obviously when you have time off, you have freshness and then you train hard and it comes back to bite you a little bit.” For many, the most recent time they will have seen Pidcock on a bike was at Milan-Sanremo, where he was centimetres away from arguably his finest one-day win. “Honestly, I need time to reflect because right now, I feel pretty disappointed,” he said afterwards. Three weeks away from racing provides plenty of opportunity for introspection. “It’s water under the bridge now, I guess,” he says. “The biggest things I’ve achieved, I’ve always imagined achieving them from a realistic starting point. For example, last year having finished on the podium of a Grand Tour, that’s a realistic starting point to then go and try to win. “I’ve never done something just out of the blue or as a total surprise. So being in that position, two times on the podium in a Monument, it helps to be able to see myself to go on and win.” And so what does that mean for Liège-Bastogne-Liège on Sunday? Pogačar will be there, but the Slovenian has been pushed in every Monument this season — whether by Pidcock in Sanremo, Mathieu van der Poel in Flanders, or in losing, finally, to Van Aert at Roubaix. “I actually think this could be the year that he doesn’t just ride off,” says Pidcock. “If I was in my best shape, Remco (Evenepoel), Paul Seixas, it’s a really strong field this year. “Obviously, I don’t know if I’m going to be there, I don’t even know if I’m going to try to follow initially on La Redoute — or, well, maybe I will. “But that’s not the intention, I’m going to try and get the best result, which probably means not going into the red so far from the finish. Liège was the biggest goal of the first part of the year, and I’m in a position where I can still go and race there. “This is probably a year where I’ll have to accept I can’t be going here to try and win — but it’s just a different mindset, a bit more relaxed. Anything that happens is a bonus because I could easily not be on that startline.” Spot the pattern. Connect the terms Find the hidden link between sports terms Jacob Whitehead is a reporter for The Athletic who covers investigations, cycling, and Newcastle United. He previously worked on the news desk. In 2025, he was a Gold Award winner at the 30 to Watch journalism awards. Follow Jacob on Twitter @jwhitey98