One of the big absentees of the pro peloton in 2026 is set to finally surface, as Olav Kooij prepares to pull on the Decathlon CMA CGM jersey for the first time at the Boucles de la Mayenne later this month.
The Dutchman had established himself as one of the top sprinters in the world over the first five seasons of his career at Visma-Lease a Bike, and his signature for the up-and-coming Decathlon team was one of the biggest moves of last winter's transfer window.
However, Kooij's planned season start at February's UAE Tour was delayed due to a virus, and there were few updates from the team as he remained sidelined all spring.
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Now, though, Kooij has a season start date, with Decathlon CMA CGM director Sébastien Joly revealing that he will line up at the Boucles de la Mayenne stage race from May 28-31. He will also race the Baloise Belgium Tour from June 17-21, giving him nine days of racing ahead of the Tour de France, where his participation remains up in the air.
"Olav is doing really well," Joly said on Eurosport France's Bistrot Vélo show. "He is going to return to racing at the Boucles de la Mayenne, then he'll do the Belgium Tour. In between, he'll do a training camp to fine-tune his sprint and his turn of speed.
"Things are really going in the right direction, and we're happy to be able to have him back with us."
Asked if his health problems were definitively behind him, Joly said: "Exactly. We are very happy to have him back in competition."
Will Kooij go to the Tour?
When Olav Kooij signed for Decathlon CMA CGM, he was effectively the first name on the teamsheet for the Tour de France. However, that doesn't look so certain now.
Having found Grand Tour opportunities hard to come by at Visma – he did the Giro in 2024 and 2025 – Kooij was itching to make a Tour de France debut that was complicated by Jonas Vingegaard's yellow jersey-hunting status within the team.
At Decathlon, he had seemingly found the perfect home, a team with increasingly big pockets and lacking a true leader for the Grand Tours, both in terms of general classification and sprints.
But Kooij's illness woes have coincided with the meteoric rise of Paul Seixas, the 19-year-old prodigy who, it was recently confirmed, will make his Tour de France debut this summer.
Seixas has already stated that he's not going to France just to gain experience; that he's chasing the best GC result possible. How Decathlon build their team around their star Frenchman remains to be seen, and the big question mark is whether there will be room in the eight-man squad for a GC rider and a sprinter – or more pertinently, for the support riders they would both need.
Kooij would require specialist lead-out riders as well as domestiques to pull on the flat stages – indeed, this would surely have been outlined over the negotiating table. Seixas, meanwhile, will need a good amount of climbing support if the team are taking his ambitions seriously.
Kooij, perhaps, faces a race against time in order to prove he is capable of winning sprint stages in this year's Tour. A lack of form in Mayenne and Belgium might just make the Decathlon selectors' decision easier, but if he can get back to his speed of old by mid-June, there is a potential headache.
