Tom Pidcock will make a surprise return to racing at the Tour of the Alps having recovered quicker than expected from Volta a Catalunya crash.
The Brit will line-up for Pinarello Q36.5 in Innsbruck tomorrow to race against Egan Bernal (Ineos Grenadiers) Giulio Pellizzari (Red Bull-Bora-Handgrohe) and Michael Storer (Tudor Pro Cycling).
Posting on Instagram, Pidcock said he’d also race next weekend’s Liège-Bastogne-Liège. “Recovery has gone super well… The Ardennes was the biggest goal of this part of the season so I’m happy to be able to still race one of them in whatever shape that may be.”
Pidcock suffered a scary crash when he fell down a ravine at Volta a Catalunya on 27 March.
At the time he said: "I was drinking on the descent and misjudged a corner.”
"It was like one of these horror crashes you see... I am lucky I could talk on the radio.”
Speaking to Jacob Whitehead at The Athletic Pidcock said: “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’. 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.”
He suffered ligament damage to his knee and stress fractures to his tibia but managed to climb back up to the road, where the team car had already driven past.
Pidcock said: “The next day, it swelled up like a balloon.”
The Brit isn’t sure how race fit he will be in Austria but is keen to test his form, which he says has survived much better than might have been expected.
He’ll have a good test as among the other leading riders taking to the start line are Derek Gee (Lidl-Trek), Ben O’Connor (Jayco AlUla) and Thyman Arensman (Ineos Grenadiers) all of whom are extremely good climbers.
The team presentation for the race is due to take place in Innsbruck at 16:00 BST today.
