Tom Pidcock has criticised the mountain bike course at the Olympic Games in Paris. The defending champion in cross-country thinks that the course is not a real mountain bike course, as it is ‘just gravel’.
Pidcock is not the only one who is critical, Puck Pieterse previously said that she also has reservations about the circuit in Paris.
“It’s not the best course in the world but it’s the same for everyone,” Pidcock said. “It’s bland and I think they could have done a better job of making a more mountain bike course.
“I love mountain biking for the reasons that drive us to enjoy it. That’s the courses you get to ride, the places you get to go to. When you just gravel over a nice hillside, it’s not really mountain biking.”
“My main goal is the mountain bike race. I’m going to think about the road race on Tuesday,” he said.
“I would be happy with the medal of the road race. The teams are pretty small, so it could be quite a different racing dynamic. It’s quite an unknown. Maybe we have to race a bit more open-minded, a bit more aggressively than we would normally with teams to control.
“You could definitely play it smart and kind of get a free ride to the finish in certain situations. And it’s going to be important to have a strong team so that we can be near the front with numbers to play those games.”
“It’s suited to the guys with raw power, the big sprinters like Van der Poel, Pedersen and others. But a guy like Remco Evenepoel can also go far because the teams are very small. It’s going to be quite a lot of maybe pretty unstructured.”
