Who’s Better: Tom Pidcock or Mathieu van der Poel?
See who's won more mountain bike races in their head-to-head matchups
ScreenshotThe website mtbdata.com is a great place to check the stats of any two top riders who have raced against each other in the past and see how their records compare. We decided to do that with Mathieu van der Poel and Tom Pidcock here in order to see what their race records look like on the MTB Data website. To use the site, we only had to type their names into the search bar for Rider 1 Name and Rider 2 Name to get the results. Here’s what we found:
Pidcock and Van der Poel have raced mountain bikes against each other seven times. Pidcock beat Van der Poel in five of those battles, while Van der Poel beat Pidcock twice. Pidcock and Van der Poel each won one of the XCO and XCC races at Nova Mesto in 2021, but the site doesn’t say which ones they won in that case; we remember reading that Pidcock won the XCO event there, so Van der Poel must have won the XCC event, unless the people at MTB Data have made a mistake in recording those results.
We still have to see if Van der Poel and Pidcock will be racing against each other on their mountain bikes this year, but we expect that we’ll probably see them both in some of the mountain bike events together. Both riders compete on both road and mountain bikes, but the payouts are much higher for the road events if they win, so we expect they’ll have to decide on a case-by-case assessment of the pros and cons of each race.
We don’t want to predict who will if they meet up again this year, but if they do, the racing should be good.
Notice that their last mountain bike race together was the test event held in 2023, the year before the Paris Olympics, and neither of them did very well in that event, with Van der Poel taking 28th place and Pidcock taking 36th. Of course, Pidcock came back in 2024 and won his second Olympic gold medal in his second Olympic mountain bike race, so we’d have to give Pidcock some extra credit there.
Check out mtbdata.com if you want to compare some of your favorite racers to find out who has the better race record.
