Van Uden reflects on 'dating' his sprint train after taking Picnic-PostNL's first win of 2026

Picnic-PostNL has not had a great start to 2026 by any measure. Pavel Bittner has carried the team to strong performances including second behind Tim Merlier at Scheldeprijs, but it wasn't until the last day of April that Casper van Uden was able finally to score the team's first win of the season on stage 5 of the Presidential Tour of Turkey. "You always have to get a feel for each other, just like you always have to go on a date a few times," Van Uden told Wielerflits before the stage, having had difficulty in the earlier sprint stages at the second-tier race. "There isn't just one thing that went wrong these past few days ... I made mistakes and was perhaps a bit too nice; maybe I need to be a bit more of an asshole, get my elbows out and put my shoulders in. Then the good results will come.” The 24-year-old Dutchman had a lot of pressure on his shoulders in his last buildup race before returning to the Giro, where he'll hope to recreate his surprise victory on stage 4. After only managing a top-30 finish in Turkey's first three sprint stages – won by Tom Crabbe (Flanders-Baloise) and Stanisław Aniołkowski (Cofidis) – Van Uden and his newly-formed sprint train were finally able to make it work on their fourth opportunity. This first win is a very important landmark for team Picnic-PostNL, which is operating under somewhat probationary conditions in 2026 after the UCI only awarded them a one-year WorldTour license pending the fulfilment of certain financial conditions.