TOUR·KINETIC

Picnic PostNL · 2026 Tour de France
Lead sprinter — the team's number-one card for the bunch finishes
Pavel Bittner

Czechia's fastest man announced himself with a millimetre photo-finish Vuelta stage win on his Grand Tour debut at 21, then stacked up sprint top-fives at last year's Tour.

Pavel Bittner paper-collage portrait in the 2026 Picnic PostNL kit

Czechia's fastest man announced himself with a millimetre photo-finish Vuelta stage win on his Grand Tour debut at 21, then stacked up sprint top-fives at last year's Tour. A nasty ankle injury at the Four Days of Dunkirk left him without racing from mid-May, but he is declared fit and Picnic PostNL are betting their Tour on his finishing speed.

Palmarès

  • Vuelta a España stage 5 winner, in a photo finish on his Grand Tour debut (2024)
  • 4th on stage 9 of the Tour de France (2025)
  • Multiple top-five sprint finishes on Tour de France debut (2025)
Cut-out factHis first Grand Tour stage win was so close it needed the photo-finish camera — and it made him a national sporting hero back home, hailed as Czechia's biggest Tour hope in a generation.

The squad

Riding the 2026 Tour with Warren Barguil, Frits Biesterbos, John Degenkolb, Robbe Dhondt, Niklas Märkl, Julius van den Berg, Frank van den Broek — see the full Picnic PostNL team page.

Portrait: AI paper-collage render (gpt-image-2) after a reference photograph — source: Wikimedia Commons, author: Nicola, license: CC BY-SA 4.0. A fan project — not affiliated with the Tour de France or A.S.O.