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• Tom Pidcock happy to ‘play down’ yellow jersey ambitions at Tour de France

  Tom Pidcock is reluctant to call it a target but the opportunity to take the yellow jersey on the opening weekend of this year’s Tour de France has not escaped his notice.

  The 23-year-old will race his second Tour this July, and said his goal is to do better than he did on debut last summer.

  That might seem a lofty ambition given how Pidcock stormed to a stunning solo stage victory on the Alpe d’Huez, the descending skills with which he escaped his breakaway companions still talked of with awe.

  But it would get even more attention if the Ineos Grenadiers rider enjoyed a spell in yellow, and a lumpy opening stage in the Basque Country offers a rider of Pidcock’s talents a chance.

  “I think it is (an opportunity), yeah,” he told the PA news agency. “It’s a possibility and something that I am aware is a possibility. I think the first stage of the Tour is one that can be treated like a one-day classic, it’s going to be a super-hard day.”

  When told that sounds non-committal, Pidcock quickly adds: “I’m just playing it down.”

  Pidcock, who proved his one-day credentials at Strade Bianche in March, is far from alone in eyeing that opening stage, but he has other goals in July too.

  He wants to show greater consistency in the general classification, and also to win a stage from the main bunch rather than a break.

  “Last year I was going to the Tour two months after being ill in the spring and then getting Covid, it was not the perfect lead in,” he said. “I think this year I’m stronger and I can do better, basically.”

  Pidcock is certainly riding high on the back of his recent spell on the mountain bike.

  The Olympic champion took two victories from the World Cup round in Novo Mesto, first storming from last to first to win a short track race he only learned he was riding with a couple of hours’ notice, then recovering from a lap-five crash to win the cross-country race.

   

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  It came after he finished second in Liege-Bastogne-Liege and third in the Amstel Gold Race at the end of April.

  The run of form is affirmation for the work Pidcock did in the winter, when he chose not to defend his cyclo-cross world title but instead focus on conditioning.

  Although a crash at Tirreno-Adriatico in late March punched a hole in some of his ambitions, the core fitness remains.

  “Definitely I feel I’m a bit more robust and certainly at a higher level and I have been for longer and I think that’s partly from the extra time spent building a base preparing,” he said. “I think that’s only going to carry into the rest of the season.”

  Throughout his young career to date, the Yorkshireman has juggled the demands of road, mountain bike and cross, but always knew there would come a time when something had to give. This season has shown how that might look.

  “I think if I want to achieve the goals I do on the road, certainly there are going to have to be sacrifices in other disciplines,” he said. “But that doesn’t mean they don’t contribute and help with those ambitions.”

  There are likely to be sacrifices too at August’s World Championships in Scotland, where the first combined multi-discipline championships is creating dilemmas for several athletes given the schedule clashes.

  Pidcock plans to race his mountain bike, so is strongly leading towards skipping the road race which comes first and could come at a cost.

  “I don’t want to do both and go home with nothing,” he said. “I’d want to ride the road race because it’s a home race and it will be a super nice experience and I think the worlds is a very special particular race where you never know what will happen.

  “It wouldn’t be a bad thing to ride, I want to ride, but would it be the best thing? I don’t know.”

  :: Tom Pidcock is a Red Bull athlete. Watch him appear in ‘Race Tapes‘, the new Red Bull series that delves into the lives of the world’s leading riders across all disciplines.

• Mark Cavendish lands emotional victory in final stage of farewell Giro d’Italia

  Mark Cavendish won the final stage of his last Giro d’Italia to spark scenes of huge emotion in Rome as Primoz Roglic confirmed his overall victory.

  Cavendish, who announced on the second rest day of this race that this season would be his last, made it look easy as he opened up several bike lengths over Alex Kirsch and Fernando Gaviria even before a crash on the final approach split the bunch.

  It was a 17th career Giro stage win for the 38-year-old Manxman, who kept alive his record of winning at least one stage every time he had taken part in the Italian Grand Tour.

  It was also Cavendish’s first win of the season and first with the Astana-Qazaqstan team, a timely confidence boost as he now turns his attentions to the Tour de France and his bid to take the stage win record there outright.

  Astana may not have the greatest sprint pedigree or a lead-out train for Cavendish, but that hardly mattered when he had Geraint Thomas – who lost the pink jersey to Roglic on Saturday’s time trial – lending a hand, the Ineos Grenadiers rider offering a lead-out going into the final two kilometres.

  The oldest ever stage winner in Giro history was a hugely popular one as Roglic and Thomas were quick to offer their congratulations.

  Roglic takes the overall win by 14 seconds from Thomas, the fourth smallest margin of victory in Giro history.

• Emily Bridges hits out at ‘failed’ British Cycling over new transgender policy

  Emily Bridges has condemned British Cycling’s new policy barring transgender athletes from competing as women as a “violent act” and called the governing body a “failed organisation”.

  Bridges, who came out as a transgender woman in October 2020, has been at the centre of the debate after British Cycling suspended its previous policy amid the controversy sparked when she sought to race as a woman at the national omnium championships last year.

  The new policy creates a new ‘open’ category in which transgender women, transgender men, non-binary individuals and those whose sex was assigned male at birth will be eligible to compete, with the ‘female’ category reserved for those assigned female at birth and transgender men yet to begin hormone therapy.

  In a lengthy statement posted on social media, Bridges said British Cycling “have no authority to control this conversation anymore”.

  “British Cycling is a failed organisation, the racing scene is dying under your watch and all you do is take money from petrochemical companies and engage in culture wars,” she wrote.

  “You don’t care about making sport more diverse, you want to make yourself look better and you’re even failing at that. Cycling is still one of the whitest, straightest sports out there, and you couldn’t care less.”

  British Cycling said its new policy was based on a consultation with riders and stakeholders, a review of available medical research conducted by chief medical officer Dr Nigel Jones, and legal advice.

  Bridges has previously said she has been part of research herself which she said showed she did not retain an advantage after hormone replacement therapy.

  Her statement on Friday added: “I agree that there needs to be a nuanced policy discussion and continue to conduct research, but this hasn’t happened.

  “Research isn’t being viewed critically, or any discussion about the relevance of the data to specific sports.

  “Any discussion is inherently political and driven by bad faith actors, and the whole discussion is framed by the media who are driven through engagement by hate and funding from far-right ultra-capitalists.

  “I’ve given my body up to science for the last two years, and this data will be out soon. There is actual, relevant data coming soon and discussions need to be had.”

  Bridges, who was previously part of the Great Britain academy with designs on competing at the Paris Olympics, said she was now questioning her future in the sport.

  “I don’t even know if I want to race my bike any more, the danger and everything that would come with racing makes it a pretty hard thing to justify to myself,” she wrote.

  “But you have no right on telling me when I am done. This is my decision and mine alone.

  “Yeah, I might be speaking strongly at the moment, but this is my reality right now. It is literally a fight for survival for me and my family at the moment.”

  British Cycling declined to respond to Bridges’ statement.