Tom Pidcock smashes Sa Calobra KOM by nearly two minutes

Tom Pidcock is the new proud holder of the Sa Calobra Strava KOM after smashing the previous best time by almost two minutes on Sunday.

Riding the famous Mallorcan climb while at the Ineos Grenadiers winter training camp, Pidcock set a head-turning new best time of 22:46 up the twisting 9.4km that averages 7 per cent.

With more than 116,000 attempts Sa Calobra is a testing ground for pros and amateurs alike, the head of the Strava leaderboard a who's who of the peloton — Gianni Moscon, Simon Yates, Sebastián Henao and British hill climbing specialist Ed Laverack.

But now ahead of them all by quite a sizeable margin is the young Brit whose talent on a bike appears to have no limits, a cyclocross world champion who won the Tour de France's Alpe d'Huez stage and is touted for a tilt at Grand Tours in the future.

386w for 22 minutes

Being a good sport Pidcock has even uploaded his ride to Strava with full power data, showing he held 386 watts for 22 minutes to take the crown meaning, at his listed Strava weight of 58kg, an eye-watering 'off-season' watts per kilogram of 6.7.

Being on training camp, and riding alongside teammates such as Ethan Hayter, Pavel Sivakov, Connor Swift and Michał Kwiatkowski we don't know how much drafting assistance Pidock had, but from Kwiatkowski and Hayter's times of 29:39 and 29:59 respectively, it seems unlikely he was towed all the way to the top.

The 386 watts meant a quite silly average speed of 24.9km/h up the seven per cent average slopes and carried Pidcock to KOM victory by 1:50 over Laverack's previous best, set back in April.

Speaking on his YouTube channel, the previous KOM-holder called it a "very sombre day in the Laverack household" but went on to stress he was "so happy" to see someone of Pidcock's ability showing his talent on the climb.

"I was shocked," Laverack admitted. "But so happy at the same time when I saw it because it's amazing that someone at this level can show what they can do. It really puts into perspective the difference in level between someone like myself and Tom. It's really cool to see.

"He rode to the climb, which is what I did as well so we're on level ground as far as that goes, he did do an effort though to get to the climb whereas I just ambled there and tried to conserve as much energy as possible.

"Sometimes these guys hide their power data or hide their heart rate and keep their power data so you don't know if it's full gas. I'm fairly confident this is a full gas effort from Tom — 172bpm average and maxes out just over 180bpm."

Commenting on whether he believes he could close the gap to Pidcock's time, Laverack said: "I would like to think if everything was absolutely perfect then I could get closer but I probably wouldn't get a minute and 50 seconds faster.

"I am taking it with a pinch of salt because it's an Ineos Grenadiers training camp, there may have been at least five or six of them on the climb at the same time. Who knows? He could have got a bit of pacing at the bottom. We don't know these things.

"What a performance by Tom. How motivating and cool is that? It's inspirational seeing it done first hand, I'm in no way upset or angry or any of the feelings you think you would feel. When someone takes it and they're of this calibre you've just got to take your hat off to them."