Pidcock wins world championship cross country mountain bike marathon gold

Olympic champion Tom Pidcock won the world championship cross country mountain bike marathon on Saturday as a crash ended Mathieu van der Poel’s dream of a unique treble.
It was a first world title in the mountain bike event for Britain’s Pidcock who raised a Yorkshire flag with a white rose above his head as he crossed the line after breaking away with two laps left.
He finished the undulating dirt track course in Scotland in 1hr 22min 09sec, ahead of Sam Gaze of New Zealand and Nino Schurter of Switzerland who was aiming for an 11th world title.
“My gears were not working on the last lap, they were jumping on every climb - and Gaze was coming behind. I thought it could all go in the bin at any moment,” he said.
“In front of my home crowd, it’s pretty special. Coming down the final straight, I could finally soak it all in,” he added.
The 24-year-old has also won a cyclo-cross world title and an iconic stage on the Tour de France at the Alpe d’Huez mountain.
Pidcock claimed cross-country short track bronze this week in what he called a warm-up race. A year ahead of the Paris Olympics the cross-discipline rider started on row five of a mass start along with van der Poel, who crashed at the end of the first lap.
Van der Poel’s first lap slip cost him a historic treble as the Dutchman was winner of February’s world cyclo-cross championships and added the road race world title to his trophies in Glasgow this week.
“My front wheel just went, the mental pain is bigger than the physical pain and it takes away some of the joy from Sunday because it was my own fault,” he said.
Earlier, Pauline Ferrand-Prevot won the cross country mountain bike world title to cement the Frenchwoman’s status as favourite for the Paris Games next year.
“I’m feeling very happy. It was a super hard race, I didn’t have a good start but I wanted to keep my own pace during all the race,” she told reporters.
“It’s what I did - full gas on the uphill and then I tried to recover on the downhill and it worked out perfectly. I’m proud of myself because I kept my plan even though I didn’t have a good start. I just said: ‘I have one mission today and I have to reach it’.”
The 31-year-old defending champion was 1min 14sec faster than her compatriot Loana Lecomte in the Glentress forest where 13 world championships events are being played out.
The Netherlands’ pre-race favourite Puck Pieterse came third at 1min 27sec.
Ferrand-Prevot now has 15 world titles in various disciplines and recently became the first female cyclist to join Ineos Grenadiers.
She has so far been cursed at the Olympics however coming 26th at London 2012, pulling out at Rio and finishing 10th
in Tokyo.