Flung into last year’s Vuelta a España as a last-minute substitution for Picnic PostNL‘s ill leader Max Poole, just a glance at the subsequent results sheets shows how keenly Kevin Vermaerke followed what was likely the only instruction on the Picnic team bus message board each morning: ‘Get into breaks.’
But whenever Vermaerke did get into a breakaway at the Vuelta – no fewer than six in nine days, five of them over 100 kilometres long – there was one thing about all of them that hardly ever changed, he said at December’s off-season training camp with his new squad, UAE Team Emirates-XRG.
“But unfortunately, I always found myself up against someone that was a little bit stronger and” – and he gestures at his new colleagues around the plush Benidorm hotel, also sitting in armchairs talking to journalists – “usually from this team.”
Not just the Vuelta
But it wasn’t just the Vuelta. Opting to move on from Picnic-PostNL had already been on the table as far back as January 2025, Vermaerke said.
“I kind of had already made the decision that I wanted to change things for next year [2026] and I was speaking to a few teams. I really…
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