Threat of relegation hangs above Picnic PostNL like a dark cloud: "The situation is a bit tricky"

The words "UCI ranking" must be a banned substance at managment of Team Picnic PostNL. Although the Dutch team is currently located in a safe 18th place, the pressure coming from XDS Astana, who closed a gap of 4.000 points already, can be felt on every step. And in case of relegation, Picnic PostNL is not on the way to secure any automatic wild cards either as a 5th team on annual ranking...

"We know that the first months, like March, are a bit tricky for us," sports director Matthew Winston acknowledges in an interview with WielerFlits. But with the same breathe, he points out that not everything went downhill from the start of 2025: "We did win (Nils Eekhoff in Nokere Koerse, ed.), but we know that we are getting into shape now." 

One of the team's leaders should be younger climber Max Poole, but his 83 UCI points are not going to be enough to save Picnic PostNL's WorldTour license. At least as things stand at the moment. "We've had a bit of bad luck so far this season," he says in an interview with WielerFlits. "A lot of riders have dropped out in the last period. The situation is a bit tricky, but if those riders return we can pick up the thread again."

At the Tour of the Alps, Picnic PostNL already showed up with a better collective performance, securing two top-10 spots in the general classification with Poole (7th) and Romain Bardet (10th). Yet they need more as XDS Astana is plotting to counter their points income at the on-going Tour of Turkiye where their GC hopes (Harold López and Wout Poels) should have an upper hand over Frank van den Broek.

In the meantime Poole and Bardet are preparing for Giro d'Italia, where Picnic hopes to shake things up by scoring a lot of points. But is there also more pressure on the climbing leaders? "No", Winston is clear. "If you put pressure on them, they will make mistakes. We focus on our tasks and on our process. We can only control what is within our power and that is in the race. We have to make the race and ride as a team."

"We shouldn't worry about what all the other teams are doing, because then we'll go crazy and that's when the pressure comes. It comes naturally. We have to stay close to our values ​​as a team and what we're best at as a team," the team manager believes.