The rider

Daan Hoole gives Decathlon's sprint project its freight engine. The Dutchman was brought over from Lidl-Trek to provide the kind of long, heavy pull that turns a messy finale into something Kooij can actually use. His 2025 Giro time-trial win in Pisa, taken in difficult weather against elite specialists, changed how the peloton reads him. He is not simply a big rider who can work. He is a proven world-class rouleur who can win when the course asks for power, control and nerve.

That skill set has two obvious Tour uses. The first comes immediately in Barcelona, where the team time trial rewards exactly the qualities Hoole owns: smooth turns, high speed, and the ability to recover from one huge pull in time to take the next. The second appears in sprint finales. Kooij needs riders who can hold position before the pure launch sequence begins, and Hoole's job is often to keep the train moving through the dangerous, high-speed middle kilometres when everyone wants the same road.

Hoole's own ambitions do not disappear inside that service. Any individual time trial or wind-shaped transitional day gives him a reason to dream, and a rider with his engine will always be useful in a breakaway that needs commitment rather than finesse. But his Tour is likely judged by how often Kooij enters the final 300 metres with choices. In modern sprinting, the fastest rider is only as good as the road delivered to him. Hoole is there to deliver that road.