A culture of fear at Picnic PostNL: Serious allegations against the management team from former employees

​After a stage of the Giro, Martijn Tusveld voiced some cautious criticism of the tactics. After that, he hardly dared to speak out for years. An investigation involving 71 insiders shows that his case at Picnic PostNL is not an isolated one.

​On the evening after the 18th stage of the 2020 Giro d’Italia, Team Sunweb are on the coach. Sports director Rudi Kemna asks Martijn Tusveld what he thinks of the tactics chosen. The Dutchman replies honestly: they could have done it differently. At the end of the season, Tusveld is told by management that he is creating a “negative atmosphere”, and his 2021 race calendar no longer includes any major races. For the professional cyclist, that evening marked a turning point in his career. From his perspective, it was also symbolic of what is said to have developed over the years within Iwan Spekenbrink’s team.

The team is now called Picnic PostNL. According to extensive research by NOS Sport and the cycling platform In De Waaier, a culture of fear has prevailed there for years. Riders and support staff are said to have felt unsafe and to have left the team traumatised. The findings were published on Thursday as a news report and also as a four-part podcast series entitled ‘De Gehaktmolen’ (The Meat Mincer). Among the authors is the journalist Thijs Zonneveld.

Picnic PostNL: 71 calls, one sample

The research is based on a wide range of sources. Over the past few months, NOS Sport and In De Waaier have spoken in confidence to 71 people who work or have worked for the WorldTour team. Many of them describe a ‘culture of fear’ and an ‘insecure working environment’. Most sources remain anonymous. Tusveld, on the other hand, has chosen to go on record.

In the winter of 2025, he sent Kemna an email, a copy of which is in the possession of the NOS. In it, he states that after the conversation at the Giro, “everything changed”. He said he was no longer the same person afterwards and no longer dared to give feedback or show his feelings. He describes how he coped with this as follows: “I thought: I’ll keep my mouth shut and just say ‘yes’ and ‘amen’.” In 2021, Tusveld suffered from depression and, by his own account, also had thoughts of harming himself. At the end of 2025, he brought his professional career to an end.

The Roots: Success and Loss of Control

According to the investigation, the developments within Team Picnic PostNL go back a long way, to the team’s most successful period. A former sporting director says that a fear of losing control crept into the management following the Tour successes with Marcel Kittel in 2013 and 2014, when the team was growing rapidly. A great many rules were put in place at that time.

However, the defining moment is considered to be the greatest triumph in the team’s history. Following Tom Dumoulin’s Giro victory in 2017, the rules and protocols were made even stricter. Dumoulin himself declined to comment on the allegations against the team. Adriaan Helmantel, who was Dumoulin’s coach for four years, recalls a meeting at the ‘team house’ in Sittard in early November 2017. An organisational chart was presented there, in which there was no longer any direct link between riders and coaches. Everything was to go through management, who would then pass on questions to coaches, doctors, nutritionists or mechanics. Coaches and riders were therefore no longer to speak to one another directly. According to Helmantel, the team management feared that the riders might otherwise make too many decisions for themselves.

Helmantel’s assessment of the consequences can be summed up in a single sentence: “It turned into a dictatorship.” A former employee confirms that, as a result, coaches and riders began to operate under the radar and, for years, shared only limited information with management in their training diaries.

No room for psychologists in the Picnic PostNL team

Further accounts from the investigation show how little room there was for mental health issues. A former driver who was struggling mentally asked if he could see a mental health coach. Kemna is said to have replied that he did not believe in psychologists. Another former professional reports that he was on the verge of a burnout and received no understanding. Support staff also found the role stressful. A former employee says that, later on, he felt mainly like a police officer and went to see a mental coach himself immediately after leaving the team.

The allegations have been confirmed by the Dutch drivers’ association, the VVBW. Its secretary, Jeroen van Keulen, says he has received several reports and accounts over the past year and a half that tally with Tusveld’s account. He says some drivers have been in tears on the phone to him.

Not the first warning

This criticism is nothing new. Back in 2021, the Flemish broadcaster Sporza published an investigative report on the team in which predominantly anonymous riders made similar allegations. Among other things, they claimed they were being treated like small children. At the time, Spekenbrink dismissed some of the criticism as the frustration of riders who had not been offered new contracts. There has been no response to the allegations from the team itself so far, despite enquiries from the two broadcasters who investigated the case.

A team under pressure, both on and off the bike

These revelations come at what is arguably the team’s most difficult time. On the sporting front, Picnic PostNL is experiencing the worst season in its history. When the UCI awarded licences in December 2025, the men’s team was granted only a one-year licence instead of one covering the entire 2026–2028 cycle. Whether it will compete in the WorldTour in 2027 depends on whether the UCI considers the financial requirements to have been met. The team had denied reports of a voluntary withdrawal to the ProTeam category.

On top of the sporting and financial crisis, there is now a crisis of credibility. For years, the team had made a name for itself through its philosophy, its protocols and its talent development programme. The investigation raises the question of what human cost this system has exacted. It is now primarily up to Spekenbrink and Kemna to provide an answer to that question.