Five From Five at Nové Město
Tom Pidcock crossed the line in the Vysočina Arena and raised one open hand. Five fingers. Five wins from five starts at Nové Město na Moravě, a venue he has never lost. The undefeated record now carries a further weight: it draws him level with Nino Schurter, whose name has defined this course for more than a decade.
The race did not come cheaply. Pidcock opened a gap early, pressing hard through the opening laps of the technical woodland circuit in the Czech Republic. France's Luca Martin, winner at Les Gets a year earlier, refused to let it settle and clawed his way back into contention. Pidcock answered on the climbs, where he had chosen to spend his strength, kicking again each time Martin drew near. He held on to win by eighteen seconds. Switzerland's Filippo Colombo completed the podium, one minute and eighteen seconds down.
What made the result firmer still was its timing. A day earlier, Pidcock had finished second in the short-track XCC event, beaten by the Frenchman Mathis Azzaro. The reply came within twenty-four hours, on the longer course, against a full field that keeps closing in on him.
"I didn't make it easy for myself, the level rises each year and I can't rest on my laurels," he said in a statement afterwards.
He was candid about the margins. He admitted he had gone out too keen in the first laps, then measured his effort as the race stretched. When Martin moved to the front, Pidcock chose to test the water rather than commit, aware that a cross-country race is a long road and that his rival was pushing him the whole way.
A Record in Reach
The venue has been kind to him from the start. His wins here now read 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 and 2026, an unbroken sequence around interruptions in his crowded calendar. Schurter, the retired Swiss master, still holds the outright course tally, and Pidcock sits one behind that mark. The record for elite World Cup victories at Nové Město, though, he now shares.
The wider portrait was already drawn. Pidcock is a two-time Olympic cross-country champion and the reigning world champion, a rider who moves between road, cyclo-cross and the mountain with rare fluency. At twenty-six, this fifth win is less a summit than a marker on the way. He framed it plainly himself: the sport keeps getting faster, and the men around him work as hard as he does, which is what keeps him honest.
Nové Město has become his measure. For now, the ground still belongs to him.
