Picnic PostNL avert unwanted record by ending 315 day win drought

On Thursday afternoon in Turkey, the 24-year-old Dutchman delivered the win Picnic PostNL had been chasing for nearly a year, powering to victory in a bunch sprint.

Picnic had not won since Oscar Onley took stage 5 of the Tour de Suisse on 19 June 2025. It stood out as one of the Scotsman’s key results, alongside his fourth place in the Tour de France, before his winter move to Ineos Grenadiers. That victory would ultimately prove to be the team’s last for 315 days.

"It's not easy, that's for sure," DS Matthew Winston had told DirectVelo at Paris-Nice in March, when Picnic had become the only WorldTour team still without a win. "I'm not going to say the results are good at the moment because that's not the case, and I understand that people are asking questions. But we must not panic, we must not want to revolutionise everything."

Despite Van Uden's pedigree, victories in 2026 had been the ones that got away from the Picnic sprint setup until this point in the season. 

The team's best result of the year was Pavel Bittner's second at Scheldeprijs in early April, where he came closer than anyone in Picnic colours to ending the drought. The Czech also picked up sixth at Ronde van Brugge and third at Bredene Koksijde Classic, an underrated body of work that yielded points but never the win the team needed.

Around Bittner's classics block, the rest of the season had been a story of small results in unfamiliar places. Frank van den Broek's third on stage 6 of Itzulia Basque Country was the team's standout stage race moment, with Chris Hamilton's 13th overall at the Tour Down Under and Bjorn Koerdt's 10th at the AlUla Tour the only other top-ten general classification finishes. 

John Degenkolb produced a 14th at In Flanders Fields, while Frits Biesterbos's seventh at the Classic Var stood as a rare result for one of the team's younger riders. Van Uden's own personal best had been a quiet eighth on the opening stage of the Tour Down Under in January, before his role was reshaped around leading out Fabio Jakobsen at the UAE Tour.

The last time a WorldTour team had to wait longer for a professional victory was Cofidis in 2021 according to the X account Cycling Statistics. They went 348 days without a win between 21 February 2020 and 2 March 2021, a period heavily impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. 

The wider context made Thursday's win heavier than it ought to have felt. Picnic PostNL lost Onley to Ineos Grenadiers over the winter in a record buy-out, a deal that, according to Money in Sport reporting, was critical to the team's survival after €19.5 million in losses across three years. 

The team was granted only a one-year WorldTour licence rather than the usual three year cycle. With every winless week, the same question kept coming back about whether the once proud outfit that claimed three Monuments in the space of two months in 2015 was quietly slipping out of the top tier.

Picnic have yet to confirm their final eight for next week’s Giro d'Italia, but Casper van Uden looks the obvious sprint option after finally breaking the drought on Thursday. The early flat stages through Bulgaria and Italy should give him a few more chances to add to a team tally that, rather remarkably, had been stuck on zero for almost a year.