"We had to start again from zero" - Oscar Onley exit still felt as Picnic PostNL search for first victory of season

Team Picnic PostNL left Paris-Nice with more doubts than certainties, and the Dutch WorldTeam now finds itself in an unfamiliar position. After losing several key riders at the end of last season, the squad is still without a victory in 2026 and has become the only WorldTeam yet to win this year. Inside the team, however, the message remains one of calm, even if the situation is clearly frustrating.

“It’s not easy, that’s for sure. 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,” Matthew Winston told DirectVelo on Sunday on the sidelines of the final stage of Paris-Nice.

“But we must not panic, we must not want to revolutionize everything because we know very well that it doesn’t work like that. We have to stay calm, hope that the injury list clears as soon as possible and keep building,” added the sports director, who has been part of the group since 2019.

Bad luck has not helped the team in recent weeks, with several riders unavailable at the same time. “Max Poole is not fully recovered and couldn’t do Paris-Nice, Nils Eekhoff is also sidelined, and Warren (Barguil) crashed in his comeback race,” Winston explained, underlining how the collective has struggled to line up at full strength since the start of the season.

When discussing the current difficulties, the departure of Oscar Onley to INEOS Grenadiers inevitably comes up. The late transfer last winter forced the team to rethink its plans and left a gap that has not yet been filled. “His departure was very damaging. Obviously it put sticks in our wheels, it changed all the plans of the team,” said Chris Hamilton, with Winston sharing the same feeling.

“We were not prepared at all for Oscar leaving. It was a big surprise for us. Once we got the information, we had to start again from zero.”

Hamilton accepts the reality of modern cycling, even if the situation still hurts. “It’s the law of the market and the way high-level sport works, we know that. It’s so competitive… The big teams are getting bigger and richer, they swallow the others, they can strip them,” said the Australian, who finished 13th at the Tour Down Under earlier this season.

The lack of results has inevitably put the spotlight on the UCI ranking and the pressure that comes with it, but inside the team the riders insist that this cannot become an obsession.

“We think about it, of course, but it’s not an obsession. We try to score points, of course, but if you only think about that, you don’t race the way you should, as a team and with the goal of winning races. If Max (Poole) had been here this week and hadn’t been sick, he would probably be in the Top 10 overall and maybe we wouldn’t be talking about this. One leader less changes a lot of things,” Hamilton said.

For Winston, the most important thing is to keep perspective. “The season started two months ago,” he reminded, insisting that it is still “too early to draw any conclusion”. He pointed to another team parked just across from the Dutch bus in Nice as an example. “We all saw what Astana managed to do last year, they turned the situation around.”