Tom Pidcock to race against America's best at Bentonville's Little Sugar MTB

Olympic and world mountain bike champion Tom Pidcock (Ineos Grenadiers) is headed to Arkansas to tackle the 100-kilometer Little Sugar mountain bike race on October 15.  

The Life Time event takes place in Bentonville, which has spent the past few years investing heavily in developing world-class biking trails and is now calling itself the "mountain bike capital of the world."

Pidcock has been traveling through North America to compete in the last two races of the UCI Mountain Bike World Cup series after completing the Tour de France and winning the UCI XCO World Championships earlier this season. He will be joined at Little Sugar MTB by Ineos Grenadiers teammate Cameron Wurf. 

Pidcock's last visit to Arkansas saw him win the rainbow bands at the 2022 UCI Cyclocross World Championships in Fayetteville. Certainly, he'll be hoping for another trip to the podium at Little Sugar though his competition will be fierce. Among the men to beat will be Life Time Grand Prix leader and all-around dominant force Keegan Swenson, Cape Epic winner Matt Beers, marathon MTB national champion Cole Paton, Canadian marathon MTB national champ Andrew L'Esperance and former marathon MTB national champion Payson McElveen. 

Little Sugar is held the week prior to the Life Time Grand Prix finale, Big Sugar, which is a 100-mile gravel race. Introduced in 2022, the Life Time Grand Prix is a season-long gravel and XC mountain bike race series in which a cast of handpicked competitors travel throughout the United States in pursuit of a $250,000 prize purse. 

This season's cast included WorldTour roadies, gravel pros, mountain bike Olympians, track world champions, a pro triathlete and even a former elite rower. Swenson is currently leading the men's leaderboard and Sofia Gomez Villafañe heads up the women's field. 

While Little Sugar is not part of the series, many of the Grand Prix contestants will also compete in the mountain bike race as a primer for the series finale six days later.