“The goal is the Tour de France and the green jersey” – Leadout legend Mark Renshaw lays out Olav Kooij’s 2026 ambition after Visma exit

Ambition is not being disguised at the Decathlon CMA CGM Team. With a new sprint structure taking shape and a clear Tour de France objective already defined, Mark Renshaw has outlined a programme built around winning at the highest level rather than settling for presence.

Speaking in quotes collected by IDL Pro Cycling, Renshaw was explicit about why he has joined the French WorldTour team and what success will be measured against.

“I think my role here has been well documented, that I’ll be mostly doing the program with Olav Kooij, and the goal is to win in the Tour de France and to look for the green jersey.”

That clarity sets the tone for a sprint project that is already being framed around outcomes rather than gradual expectation management.

Renshaw’s move into the Decathlon setup marks a significant shift in emphasis for the team. Rather than targeting consistency or incremental results, the focus is firmly on victories, a point he made clear when discussing what drew him to the role.

“The main point was the possibility to work with pure, high-class, world-renowned sprinters,” he said, referring to the depth now available within the squad. “The opportunity to work with these guys, and to not look for top-five or top-ten, but to look for the victory.”

That mindset is accompanied by an acceptance of the pressure that comes with elite sprinting ambitions. “It’s obviously more pressure, but I love… I always say there’s a saying: pressure makes diamonds, and I love this.”

Rather than being treated as a burden, expectation is presented as a necessary part of competing at the very top of the sport.

Despite the directness of the long-term Tour goal, Renshaw has been careful to frame the early part of the season as a process rather than a finished product. He stressed that the immediate task is not dominance, but cohesion.

“They are really good bike riders,” he said of the sprint group. “Now we have to bring them together, we have to create a culture, confidence, and give each rider experience riding together, so we can abstract the maximum potential from each rider.”

Communication and familiarity are central themes in that approach. “How we get there, it’s going to be a learning process for the first part of the year, and about improving the communication and the confidence with each other.”

The message is one of patience in execution, but not in ambition.

When turning his attention to the Tour de France, Renshaw avoided over-promising while still underlining belief in what is possible. “Realistically there might be six, there might be seven chances,” he said when discussing sprint opportunities, before narrowing that down further. “Numbers game says probably five pure sprints in the Tour. Pure sprints meaning that we don’t have some kind of upset during the stage.”

That assessment feeds directly into the green jersey conversation, an objective that has become increasingly complex in recent editions of the race. Renshaw pointed to changes in sprint placement and scoring while acknowledging the influence of all-round contenders such as Tadej Pogacar on the competition. “Looking at the sprint locations for the bonus sprint, one sprint a day, it should skew it a little bit more in the favour of a pure sprinter,” he said. “But the consistency is the key.”

It is a measured view, grounded in mathematics and race dynamics rather than rhetoric.