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.”
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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.”
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.