A minor mystery has been solved: Tom Pidcock will continue to ride Pinarello bikes when or if he enters cyclocross, mountain bike, or gravel races, despite his move to the Scott-sponsored Q36.5 Pro Cycling Team. He will race on Scott bikes on the road with Q36.5.
Such a race bike ménage à trois is unusual. Pidcock riding both Pinarello and Scott in 2025 will be one of the very few instances of a modern, top-tier pro slinging a leg over multiple bike brands in a single season. Generally, such a thing only happens when a brand doesn’t make a certain type of bike – like when Pidcock (then racing for Ineos Grenadiers) rode BMC frames in Mountain Bike World Cup events before Pinarello finally made him a decent mountain bike.
That isn’t the case here. Scott’s large stable of cross-country, gravel and cyclocross bikes, and the brand’s longtime investment in the XC space (for example, sponsoring a certain 10-time World Champion), would seem to match up well with Pidcock’s off-road goals. But the sponsorship split makes perfect sense given the stakeholders and how things played out behind the scenes.
As with any good mystery, one must follow the money. The financial might behind Q36.5, and the man who enabled Pidcock’s transfer to a team that is otherwise barely in the running for a Vuelta a España invite, is billionaire mining magnate Ivan Glasenberg. Glasenberg owns a significant portion of the road team’s naming sponsor, clothing brand Q36.5, and also in 2023 purchased a controlling stake in Pinarello from private equity firm L Catterton for a reported €200 million. He’s worth somewhere around US$11 billion.
Boiled down, Pidcock is now riding for companies in which Glasenberg has a financial interest, except where an existing contract with Scott makes that impossible. That contract runs through the end of 2025 and it doesn’t take a fortune teller to guess which bike brand will probably step in to sponsor the team starting in 2026.
To pre-empt the question: Q36.5’s three-year deal with Scott was signed prior to the team’s 2023 launch, months before Glasenberg purchased Pinarello. So in the short term, Pidcock will ride for Glasenberg’s Pinarello for any off-road events, and the existing road contract with Scott will also be honored.
Poor Scott, then? Perhaps. A brand that has put so much energy and cash into XC racing over the last decade, sponsoring the likes of Nino Schurter, would have loved to add Pidcock to its roster. And in a press release sent out Monday, Pidcock and Pinarello expressed satisfaction with their ongoing partnership, but Scott’s view on the matter was not included in Pinarello’s press release.
We reached out to Scott and all appears amicable. Scott explained that it sponsors the Q36.5 Pro Cycling Team and as such it is “very happy” that Pidcock will ride Scott bikes and Syncros components in road races, but noted that there is a “long-standing partnership between Tom and Pinarello for off-road bikes, which is something that we respect.”
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