PINARELLO-Q36.5 PRO CYCLING TEAM

Q36.5, a cycling apparel brand set up in Italy by Luigi Bergamo in 2013, gets its name from the Latin quaerere ("to search") and the ideal body temperature (in degrees), which its clothing helps to maintain during exertion. The deep pockets behind this business are the same that purchased 80% of Pinarello stock in 2023 and belong to the billionaire Ivan Glasenberg. The former top race walker, who was born in South Africa and has held a Swiss passport since 2011, made his fortune as the CEO of Glencore, one of the largest commodity trading and mining companies in the world. While he likes to keep a low profile, the leader of his cycling outfit, Tom Pidcock, has hailed him as "the reason I'm on this team".

The manager, Douglas Ryder, another South African who has moved to Switzerland, was the man who brought the first African trade team to the Tour de France, successively known as MTN, Dimension Data, NTT and Qhubeka between 2015 and 2021. He started with a clean slate with Q36.5 in 2023. He began with modest ambitions (with Matteo Moschetti claiming the Clásica de Almería and the GP d'Isbergues that year) but continued to raise the bar (with David de la Cruz taking the Spanish time trial championship and Jannik Steimle bagging the GP de Denain in 2024) until he managed to sign Tom Pidcock with the assistance of Pinarello, which had also been supplying his bicycles over at Ineos Grenadiers.

The English all-rounder, an Olympic gold medallist in mountain biking in Tokyo in 2021 and Paris in 2024, world cyclo-cross champion in 2022 and winner of the Alpe d'Huez stage in his Tour de France debut in 2022, has been the squad's ticket to the big leagues. He started the 2025 season with a bang, storming to victory in the AlUla Tour before finishing as the runner-up to Tadej Pogačar in Strade Bianche and taking third in La Flèche Wallonne. As the cherry on top, he clambered onto the bottom step of the podium in La Vuelta, making him the first rider competing for a wildcard team to finish on the podium of a Grand Tour in fifteen years! As one of the top 3 ProTeams in the UCI 2025 ranking, Q36.5 earned the right to make its Tour de France debut in 2026. Tom Pidcock is poised to return to the Grande Boucle two years after his DNF in Pau, which occurred at a point in his career where he direly needed to turn over a new page.