“Mads Carries The Maillot Vert Brief, Mattias Carries The Closing-Week Mountain Rotation, And This Is The Most Explicit Two-Jersey Roster The American WorldTour Squad Have Ever Assembled For A Grande Boucle” — Lidl-Trek Confirm Full 2026 Tour de France Eight-Rider Squad
Thursday dawn Madison. Fifty-eight days from the 4 July Lille Grande Départ of the 113th edition of the Tour de France, Lidl-Trek have closed their 2026 Tour de France eight-rider squad on the most explicit two-jersey brief the American WorldTour squad have ever assembled for a Grande Boucle. The squad, confirmed at a 23:48 Wisconsin local closed-team race-strategy briefing, reads Mads Pedersen, Mattias Skjelmose, Giulio Ciccone, Jasper Stuyven, Quinn Simmons, Toms Skujiņš, Edward Theuns and Carlos Verona.
The brief is built around two protected jerseys: Pedersen on the maillot vert points classification and Skjelmose on the maillot blanc young-rider competition with a closing-week GC rotation. Pedersen 6/4 the maillot vert outright, the shortest pre-Tour green-jersey price the Dane has carried since his 2022 Cofidis-debut campaign, and contracted from 9/4 across the closing month on the strength of his Romandie Stage 2 sprint win and his closing-Sunday Leysin top-ten that confirmed the closing-fortnight mountain-form line. Skjelmose 12/1 maillot blanc and 25/1 GC outright, contracted from 16/1 GC across a four-week window on the strength of his Brabantse Pijl podium and Amstel Gold third place.
Ciccone takes the closing-week mountain rotation in a Skjelmose-support role across the four high-mountain summits between the Stage 14 Pyrénées block and the Stage 18 Alpe d'Huez closing summit. The 30-year-old Italian, who closed his spring on a Tirreno top-five and a Volta a Catalunya top-eight, holds a 33/1 outright on a closing-week breakaway scenario and is the principal Lidl-Trek climbing road-captain through the closing fortnight. The internal expected-value model puts the squad at 28% on a Pedersen maillot vert in Paris and 18% on a Skjelmose maillot blanc, with a combined two-jersey probability of 11% the cleanest two-jersey line Lidl-Trek have ever banked at the sixty-days-out checkpoint.
Stuyven and Simmons are the principal Pedersen lead-out launchers across the seven priced sprint days, with Skujiņš and Theuns rotating through the closing-week breakaway-and-cobbled-defence brief. Verona, the 33-year-old Spanish veteran whose Vuelta a España top-fifteen pulled him through last August, takes the GC road-captain rotation as the principal Skjelmose mountain wingman. The squad's eight-rider list is the first Tour de France roster Lidl-Trek have closed without Julien Bernard on the sheet since the 2022 transition window, with Bernard rotated to the Vuelta a España in a protected-GC support role for Nys.
The closing pre-Tour build opens at the rebranded Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes from 7 to 14 June for Pedersen, Skjelmose and Ciccone, with the Skjelmose-led roster rolling into the 14 June Combloux summit and the 15 June Plateau de Solaison ITT as the closing-form pivot before the 4 July Lille flag drop. Pedersen will use the Belgian time trial championships at Hesbaye on 18 June and the Danish national championships at Sønderborg on 21 June as the closing pre-Lille public form-pivots. Lidl-Trek DS Luca Guercilena briefed the closed-team meeting on the two-jersey brief at the Wisconsin service course, with the closing-week public confirmation rolled into the team's 06:00 Madison-time Thursday-morning press-release window.
The squad confirmation closes the third-longest-running open Tour de France line-up question on the 2026 cycling calendar, behind only the closed UAE Vermeersch confirmation and the Wednesday-evening Soudal Quick-Step Magnier-led brief. Pedersen's maillot vert defence is the most explicit green-jersey campaign the Dane has run since 2022 and the cleanest pre-Tour green-jersey form-line a Lidl-Trek points-classification leader has carried into a Grande Boucle in the team's American-ownership era.
Skjelmose's GC line is the second-cleanest pre-Tour GC briefing a Danish rider has carried into a Grande Boucle in the post-2022 era, behind only Vingegaard's closing-form line on the day after the 2024 Lille route reveal. The closing-week mountain rotation through Ciccone, Verona and a Skujiņš-support role is the cleanest closing-fortnight wingman trio Lidl-Trek have ever taken to the Grande Boucle, and the brief explicitly trades a top-five GC ambition for the maillot blanc and the closing-week individual stage-win line that Skjelmose's spring form-pivot now supports.