Blocking out the keyboard warriors - Picnic PostNL fire back 💻 🔥
Alex Edmondson and Matt Winston interviews following a stunning day at the Giro d'Italia
Hi subscribers,
To coincide with the Giro d’Italia, I’ve set up a ✨ special 20% sale ✨ on annual subscriptions. Just click on the link below to sign up. For roughly £1 a week, you get all the stories on my Substack, including all the transfer exclusives.
This morning, at the picturesque start of stage 4 of the Giro d’Italia in Alberobello, I had the pleasure of catching up with Matt Winston from Team Picnic PostNL. We discussed the team at the Giro, and he was excited to see what Casper van Uden could do in the sprint that would ultimately decide the stage. We chatted about lead-outs and UCI points, and at the end, Matt turned and pointed to a set of small paw prints smudged across the windshield of his team car.
“Looks like a cat’s been on our car,” he said in his thick northern accent.
When I suggested that this was a sign of good luck for the stage ahead, neither of us thought too much about it, but a few hours later, when Casper van Uden tore through to take his first WorldTour win on his Grand Tour debut, it was the first thing I reminded Winston of. Forget the months of training and preparation, sacrifice and hard work. This win was down to superstition.
Of course, a curious cat can’t be attributed to Team Picnic PostNL's success, although if you catch sight of Alexander Vinokourov covered in scratches at tomorrow’s stage, we might have found cycling’s latest marginal gain.
Feline falsehoods aside for one moment, this was a huge win for Team Picnic PostNL and Casper van Uden. The team have been under pressure all season, not least because of the WorldTour relegation battle they’ve been dragged into. XDS Astana, a relegation rival at the start of the year, have been on a hot streak all season and look destined for safety, while Picnic PostNL have struggled due to injuries, illnesses, bad luck, and – by Winston’s admission to the Substack during the Tour of the Alps – "some performances where we needed a bit more fire".
There was certainly no lack of fight or fire on Tuesday as Picnic PostNL came through with the most robust and cohesive lead-out trains before delivering Van Uden to within sight of the line. The 23-year-old still had a lot to do, but he edged out Olav Kooij, Maikel Zijlaard and maglia rosa Mads Pedersen to give his team the perfect tonic for their relegation woes, and just their third win of the campaign.
Read more: In Mads Pedersen, Mathias Vacek has the perfect role model 🇩🇰 🇨🇿
“It’s a first Grand Tour win for Casper, and he’s been a guy who has really tried over the last few years to have that big breakthrough win,” Winston told me after the win.
“He’s been on the cusp, and he’s done a lot of good, but he’s also had to learn a lot because he’s a young rider who is stepping up. There have been steps there. He went to the Tour of Turkiye, and people were saying, ‘he did nothing in Turkiye but he still goes to the Giro?’ But when he arrived in the Giro, I spoke to him and said, ‘Don’t read that stuff because no one will remember Turkiye if you win a stage here.'"