It’s not easy being a second-division bike racing team.
While the WorldTeams of the sport’s first division enjoy automatic invitations to all WorldTour events – including the all-important Tour de France – the ProTeams in road racing’s second tier are not so fortunate. In an increasingly stratified professional peloton where a few superteams dominate the sport, those ProTeams further down the standings must scrape and crawl for every opportunity to race with the hope of either earning enough points for a promotion or at least catching the eye of race organizers.
Q36.5 boss Doug Ryder saw the path forward for his own second-division team last year. For more reasons than one, he and the team knew they needed to make a transfer market splash if they were ever going to rise up the UCI rankings and draw the attention required to earn wildcard invitations to events.
“You need a big name, and you need someone that you can hang your hat on, that can lift the team and help it prosper and perform,” Ryder told Escape Collective on a video call from the team’s training camp in Calpe, Spain.
Based on the sheer volume of headlines in the wider cycling media coming out of Calpe, following a kit reveal and the press conference of star signing Tom Pidcock, Ryder and team can check one big item off of their to-do list. Q36.5 may be sitting at a modest 24th in the UCI rankings this relegation cycle, likely setting them up for three more years in the second division – but few first-division squads can boast as much media attention as Q36.5 is getting right now, or indeed since late last year.
It was then that rumors began to emerge connecting Q36.5 to Pidcock, a two-time Olympic mountain bike gold medalist and winner of Strade Bianche, the Amstel Gold Race, and a stage at the Tour de France.
By the time Pidcock’s split from the Ineos Grenadiers and signing with Q36.5 were officially announced in December, the news was no longer much of surprise. What’s more, it seemed to make perfect sense too as observers – Escape Collective included – connected the dots between Pidcock and Ivan Glasenberg, a financial backer of Q36.5 (the team and its cycling apparel brand title sponsor) and also the owner of Pinarello, Pidcock’s longtime bike sponsor at Ineos.
Ryder, however, explained that there were plenty of moving parts in the deal, and confirmed rumors that the goal of making a big splash in the transfer market didn’t necessarily start with Pidcock.
“There’s no secret that we were looking at Mark Hirschi, Julian Alaphilippe,” Ryder said of the team’s approach to the transfer market last year. “We were always in the market and looking for a for an icon and a flagship rider, because we know riders want races, races want riders and at the moment, the biggest races want the best riders in their races, to give the best show, to get the most media attention and crowd engagement and fan engagement.”
How it all came together
Early on last season, it did not seem as if Pidcock would be available, considering his contract with the Ineos Grenadiers. Unlike Hirschi and Alaphilippe, both of whom signed with rival Swiss ProTeam Tudor, Pidcock wasn’t really a free agent. Eventually, however, Ineos and the 25-year-old Brit began considering an early split, and it was thanks to various connections – not just the Glasenberg-Pinarello link but also relationships between Ryder, Pidcock, and Pidcock’s agent – that conversations started to take place about a possible deal. But the seeds for a partnership were sown well before that.
“The attraction of Tom, and bringing Tom into our team started three years ago when I went for a ride with Tom in Girona just as a planned thing, and we just got to know each other a little bit,” Ryder said. That was 2022; Qhubeka-NextHash team had ended, and he was in the process of setting up Q36.5, which began racing in 2023.
“We didn’t have a big budget then, and didn’t have the opportunity to increase it to potentially bring someone, and we were joking about it.”
It wasn’t until two years later that what began as a Pidcock pipedream started to seem like a possibility. At around the same time last year that Q36.5 started to look for a marquee rider to invest in with their increasing budget, the relationship between Pidcock and Ineos was souring. As Pidcock considered leaving, his agent Andrew McQuaid, who has worked with Ryder and Ryder’s teams on various occasions in the past, told Ryder that Pidcock was “looking around.”
“We threw our hat in the ring, and then we had some couple of meetings, and that’s kind of how it all started to evolve, for him to be interested in us,” Ryder said.
From there, Q36.5 found itself vying with other squads that were also in the market for Pidcock. In the competition for the Brit’s signature, it certainly helped that they were able to arrange a deal whereby two-time Olympic mountain bike champ could continue to ride Pinarello in that discipline.
“If you think, he created that bike, him and his [coach] Kurt [Bogaerts],” Ryder said (Bogaerts has also come across from Ineos). The bike in question is the Dogma XC, the flagship full-suspension model of the Pinarello brand owned by Glasenberg, who Ryder explained is also a board member for the Q36.5 team through his financial stake in the Q36.5 clothing brand.
“Tom’s a very loyal guy. And Scott, our road bike partner, they’re amazing, they understood that and they were happy to accommodate that,” Ryder said. “In the end, we wanted to make sure that we could give maximum value to an individual and support his dreams and goals and see what he could achieve, and that’s cool. And when you’ve got partners in the industry that support that, which is quite rare, you’ve got a really strong foundation to build on something amazing.”
All that said, it was still quite a feat to bring Pidcock aboard considering the caliber of team he was leaving behind and the fact that Q36.5 is a second-division team that is not close to promotion to the WorldTour level right now. In the end, it was up to Ineos to agree to let Pidcock go, which they did, and up to Pidcock to decide where he would sign. He liked enough about Q36.5 to make the jump.
“He chose our team because he wanted to have fun. He didn’t want to fight for leadership. He wanted to be in a team that people believed in him,” Ryder said. “He also knows that we were a WorldTour team [Ryder is referring to his former team, which as Dimension Data and finally Qhubeka-NextHash spent six years in the WorldTour. – Ed.] and we’ve never reduced our infrastructure or our commitment to want to be at the highest levels.”
As Ryder put it, “Coming to us was a risk, but it became a calculated risk.”
A long-term project
For now, Q36.5 has little expectation of getting invitations to the biggest races. The Giro d’Italia and the Vuelta a España are at least possibilities for 2025, but Pidcock said in his press conference over the weekend that his new team isn’t expecting a Tour de France invitation this season. That is a stark contrast to what Pidcock could expect at his former team; unlike at Ineos, the calendar at Q36.5 is not entirely within the team’s hands as they must rely on organizers for invites.
On the bright side, Ryder says the mere presence of Pidcock in the team’s roster has already led to calls from race organizers: “I’m always phoning race organizers and lobbying to get in, and now with Tom, a lot of the race organizers have phoned me. I said, ‘Did you lose my number?'”
In any case, Ryder also points out that Pidcock has “absolutely” bought into the longer-term approach, knowing that it could take some time to get to the point where invitations are more readily available. For one thing, Pidcock apparently doesn’t mind missing the Tour this year, saying that he is “happy” to take a year off from the biggest race in the sport. He also does expect (or perhaps he already knows) that team will get invitations at the races he is targeting.
“In theory, we should have all the races that I want to do,” Pidcock said.
With that in mind, Q36.5 is currently focused on doing everything possible in 2025 to set the table for bigger goals ahead. Ryder is realistic about the short-term, knowing that Pidcock and talents like Fabio Christen, Matteo Moschetti and newcomer Milan Vader can push for success wherever the team earns invitations this year with an eye towards both racking up UCI points and catching organizer attention.
“We know we’re not in the runnings for a promotion in in 2026, and that’s fine,” Ryder said. “2025 is going to be a year where we’re going to work together. We’re going to see where we have limitations, and we’re going to see where we can profit, and we can see where there are gaps and we know what we need to do moving forward. It gives us a good foundation and a good start for the next relegation promotion cycle. And of course, the more we rise up the rankings, the more opportunities and the more consistent our calendar can be, and more predictable.”
The goal of a WorldTour promotion, then, is something the team team will aim to achieve through the promotion/relegation cycle that ends in 2029. That’s obviously a long ways off – two years after Pidcock’s current deal expires, in fact – meaning that for the foreseeable future, wildcard invitations will be the team’s pathway to the Tour startlist. Intriguingly, Ryder notes that Pidcock still has his sights set on the general classification of the Tour de France, where he believes that a podium is possible.
“The Tour de France is Tom’s ultimate dream,” Ryder said. “He won on Alpe d’Huez, he was 13th overall on the GC without focusing on the GC. That’s his love and that’s something that he wants to achieve.”
For now, though, any Tour podium ambitions will take a back seat to one-day events and whatever stage races the squad attends this year. Realistically, it is only if Pidcock and his teammates can perform there that they will even get invited to race the French Grand Tour in the future. Then again, Pidcock’s track record in races like Strade Bianche and the Ardennes suggests that Q36.5 can be optimistic about their chances for success in the races where he thrives.
Moreover, Ryder is hoping that Pidcock is the rising tide that will raise all of the ships at Q36.5.
“Many of our riders and our team have said it’s going to be a privilege to ride alongside him, and they look forward to supporting him and supporting the objectives of the team, and that’s quite exciting,” he said. “Of course, there’s a second program without potentially Tom in some races, but [along] with [Giacomo] Nizzolo, Moschetti, Frederik Frison, we’ve got [Harm] Vanhoucke, Milan Vader.”
If all goes well, Q36.5 will finish the 2025 season more highly ranked and with improving results to show organizers, which Ryder and team will hope can translate to more opportunities to do more of the same the following year. By then, they may also have reinforcements too. Although Pidcock can’t have come cheaply, Ryder said that Q36.5 “absolutely” plans to be active in the next transfer market too, “not to compete with leadership, but to come to just to strengthen the team completely.”
In other words, Pidcock is expected to be the featured rider during his time at Q36.5, but he is not the only piece of the puzzle that Ryder is tying to put together. If Pidcock can perform as expected, Ryder is hoping that others either already in the squad or potentially in the transfer market can follow.
“When someone wins in a team, it’s like a tumbleweed that goes through the desert,” he said. “It just keeps going and it gets bigger and bigger. Momentum drives belief.”
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