Team Picnic–PostNL

I'm not trying to be too respectful if there's any truth in any of this.

But Picnic, Post and Ale are not competing for many race wins at the moment.

No, it's not very effective, is it?

Yeah, so they've got financial...

EF get a big rider off the wage bill, if you like, presumably some kind of settlement fee is there.

Of course.

What I didn't mention there is the chat I was having with Peter about the Picnic Post and Ale shenanigans, to borrow the word that he used.

and the Oscar only move from Picnic Post to INEOS was almost a let's get riders and try and sell them on almost like a soccer team would do from the view that we'll get some money back and it'll kind of plug this multi-million euro gap that we have in the budget and But that's a very dangerous business model in a sport that doesn't yet operate like that

this year.

Picnic Personnel say they're going to be there again.

They've been delayed by bankruptcy of...

Who's the company that owns LaPierre?

yeah.

That's quite a lot of teams to be missing.

Picnic's in a particularly unusual spot in that they're also only on a one-year, sort of strange one-year license.

Last year, the UCI said, everybody gets a three-year license except for Picnic.

Before we dive into 2026 as a whole, there have been some news drops in the last couple of days, and so we are gonna just really quickly touch on those.

The biggest kind of upset in, in the sport at the moment is Picnic PostNL.

Um, they, along with Jayco as well actually, did... were not on the list of teams that applied for WorldTour status in 2027.

It could be they just are missing something, and they're gonna file the paperwork later.

So i- it's not-

Yeah

... not as big a news, but in terms of Picnic PostNL, um, and the women's team specifically because I think that the men's team is its own conversation, and the, the Spin Cycle podcast covered that sufficiently.

But for the women's team, they have, they've been experiencing a, a mass exodus of riders, um, and have not announced a single new signing.

That speaks how badly things are going at Picnic Post now because they've taken a job up at Man United, big gym rack that's Man United.

Welcome back to SpinCycle, everybody.

I'm Caley Fretz.

Today on the show, Total Energies could be back in business.

Richard Carapaz is maybe recording fake phone calls and Picnic strikes back.

Let's get to it.

Welcome back to the show.

Yeah, because they came into the season like, we're going to do this and this and we're going to win this race and we're focusing on this and then none of it happens because they're deeply outgunned, right? And so then they have to go do this at the end.

I don't want to call it an incident because I feel like it's been going on for a while.

This is not the first... article that is released that basically tears down the culture the team culture within a picnic post nil i vaguely remember us discussing a very similar article coming out by sportza in roughly 2021 maybe 2022 don't exactly know what the date was on that one but we've dived into this a few times before because it's a It comes to the point where I've seen so much smoke about team culture at Picnic Post-NL that I refuse to believe that there's Not a little bit of fire, you know? There has to be some reality where this frustration stems from.

And like you said, there's some witness testimonies.

Now, initially it said that there's 71 testimonies describing that culture of fear within the article.

That sounds like a good idea.

Picnic PostNL have said they have no intention to step down to the ProTour despite rumors.

I thought you were gonna say Picnic PostNL have no intention of winning a bike race.

Wow.

Ronan, I love it when you come out swinging.