As always, Nove Mesto proved itself to be one of the best venues for World Cup racing as we were treated to some incredible moments across a packed schedule of racing. It’s great to be back to proper World Cup racing with live broadcasts and here are a few of the things we spotted from the opening round of the XC series.
Tom Pidcock Secures his First XCC Win & Perfect Weekend
Despite seemingly having plenty of success in his off-road ventures it’s surprising that Tom Pidcock has never won an XCC race or achieved the rare perfect weekend. Previous years have seen Tom Pidcock’s best XCC results come from Nove Mesto but unlike his ability to seemingly always win the XCO here, he has only managed a second place at both 2021 and 22 rounds. A perfect weekend seemed impossible heading into the opening round, but a last-minute XCC call-up meant Tom Pidcock could enter the short track race and an impressive performance saw him go from 40th to 1st. With that Tom Pidcock finally got his XCC win after four unsuccessful attempts. But a win in XCC wasn’t enough for Tom Pidcock as he fought hard through the wet and wild conditions for the Elite Men’s XCO race to secure his third consecutive Nove Mesto win and his first perfect weekend. Tom Pidcock is now going on a break from XC for a while but he is expected to be back for World Champs in August.
Evie Richards is Back & Looking Fast
After a tough 2022 following her incredible 2021 season where she secured the rainbow stripes, Evie Richards seems to be back on top form in Nove Mesto. The flat-out XCC Short Track race saw the British rider take a great 5th-place finish before she would ride to 4th in the XCO on Sunday. Evie Richards was on track for greater things before a mid-race puncture and slow wheel change took her out of contention. While she may not have taken the top honors at Nove Mesto she will be leaving the Czech Republic with a lot of confidence for the rest of the season as she took her best results since winning at Snowshoe in 2021.
Looking at the lap times produced by Evie Richards you can see that she was very much one of the riders to beat on Sunday. Leading for both lap one and two Evie would suffer a puncture on lap three dropping to seventh position. From here to the end of the race she would fight back to set the fastest times for the closing two laps. The first of these would better the race winner Puck Pieterse by seven seconds and 2nd-placed Pauline Ferrand Prevot by two. The final lap is where things get very interesting as Evie Richard’s lap bettered the winner by 14 seconds and was a huge 26-second improvement over Pauline Ferrand Prevot’s. Given another lap and it is feasible that she could have ridden her way back into the lead. If she can get a clean race at Lenzerheide we could be in for an amazing performance.
More Road Teams & Brands Getting Involved
The slow creep of road racing teams and brands into XC World Cups is continuing as we saw Alpecin–Deceuninck win the Elite Women’s race, a new bike from Willier take the U23 Women’s victory and Tom Pidcock pilot this new Pinarello to two wins. Just the battle for the win in the Elite Women’s race between Alpecin–Deceuninck (Puck Pieterse) and the Ineos Grenadiers (Pauline Ferrand Prevot) wouldn’t be out of place in a Grand Tour.
Along with this the Jumbo–Visma team were in attendance with Milan Vader rocking a special link to replace the rear shock on his new Cervélo ZFS-5 full-suspension race bike. It is very interesting to see these road teams and the engineers of brands that are big in the road world really start to pay attention to XC racing.
Puck Pieterse & Joshua Dubau are Two More Multi-Discipline Talents
Alongside the increased interest of road brands and teams in XC, we are seeing some incredibly talented riders tackling multiple disciplines with great success. Two great examples of riders having great first successes in the elite XC ranks are Puck Pieterse and Joshua Dubau. Puck Pieterse who is just 21 has moved up early to elite racing in 2023 and already has dethroned world champion Pauline Ferrand Prevot in an incredible race performance coming back from a seven-second deficit on the French rider to launch a last-minute attack and win by five seconds. The Dutch rider has already had an incredible career across XC, Road and Cyclocross. In 2023 she has already picked up the title in the European U23 Cyclocross championships and the Elite Dutch Cyclocross championships. Puck Pieterse also came fifth in the Strade Bianche road race.
Puck wasn’t the only rider to upset the Ineos Grenadiers as Joshua Dubau made the racing in Nove Mesto a lot harder for Tom Pidcock than he may have thought it would be. The Rockrider Ford Racing Team rider took on the big guns sticking to Tom Pidcock’s back wheel and rode a flawless race while the Olympic champion continued to make errors on the wet course. In a David versus Goliath esque battle of Rockrider against Pinarello it was impressive to see Joshua Dubau seemingly come from nowhere in the XC ranks to take on a rider who is quite possibly one of the big talents across the whole of cycling. We can’t wait to see how both Puck Pieterse and Joshua Dubau continue with this great form through the rest of the season. Similar to Puck Pieterse, Joshua Dubau has also seen some great successes when taking on the world of Cyclocross.
Warner Bros. Discovery Delivered on the Promise of More Race Coverage
To give credit where it is due there was a lot of worry about what the new World Cup series and its coverage would look like under Warner Bros. Discovery and the ESO, but they have nailed it for the first round. It’s fair to say that the EWS and now the Enduro World Cup has always struggled with finding a format for its coverage and pairing this with a live timing system that often breaks, confidence among many was low heading into 2023. But the coverage from Nove Mesto was great with a full weekend of racing content to dig into from the free U23 racing and the paid-for Elite action. The biggest positive change we saw is what feels like an almost complete camera coverage of the course. When a rider would leave the frame you would then follow them into a new shot, whether that was with static cameras or even some amazingly piloted drones tracking riders through the trees. While XC has historically had better track coverage than DH this gives us plenty of hope that seeing an almost full top to bottom run could actually be realised.
