Renshaw And Haussler Join Decathlon CMA CGM Sports Direction As The Team Formally Bolts A Sprint Project Onto Its Existing Classics Spine
Decathlon CMA CGM have confirmed two of the most significant non-rider signings of the 2025-26 transfer window, with Mark Renshaw and Heinrich Haussler both joining the French squad's sports direction with effect from the Giro d'Italia week. The two appointments formalise the structural change the team have been previewing since the autumn: a fully resourced sprint project lifted onto the existing classics-and-stage-race spine that has carried the squad through the past two seasons, rather than the catch-as-catch-can sprint card the squad have run since the Bouhanni reset of 2024.
Renshaw, the 43-year-old Australian who rode professionally from 2004 to 2019 and was for several seasons one of the most respected lead-out men in the WorldTour, joins from XDS Astana, where he has been a sports director since 2024 after a consultancy role the year before. The move had been signalled inside the paddock since late March, with both Renshaw and Decathlon CMA CGM general manager Dominique Serieys repeatedly declining to comment when asked at the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix weekends. With Stage 1 of the Giro now less than 24 hours away in Bulgaria, the team have moved to put the announcement on the record before the first Grand Tour of the year.
Renshaw's specific brief is the new sprint project, which is built around Olav Kooij, the Dutch sprinter who has signed a three-year contract from Visma-Lease a Bike and will join the team from 1 January 2027. Kooij will not race for Decathlon CMA CGM in 2026, but Renshaw is already on the ground building the lead-out infrastructure he will inherit, with the squad's existing fast men — Sandy Dujardin and Paul Penhoet — serving as test cases for the formation work through the back end of this season.
Haussler, the 41-year-old former Cervelo, Garmin and Bahrain Victorious classics specialist who retired in April 2023 and most recently worked as a sports director at Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe, takes the second appointment. His brief is the classics department, where he joins existing directors Luke Rowe and Julien Jurdie. The structural intent is to give the squad three classics-experienced voices in the team car for the cobbled and Ardennes blocks, a depth of bench the team have not had since the original AG2R-Citroën configuration of the late 2010s.
The classics group at Decathlon CMA CGM is currently anchored by Oliver Naesen and Benoît Cosnefroy, with the latter also one of the principal Tro-Bro Léon cards inside the Twin-Card Brief currently sitting in its closing 48-hour lock for Sunday. Haussler's appointment is also a forward-looking one: the squad have publicly identified the 2027 cobbled block as the window in which they intend to convert Paul Seixas from the under-23 classics calendar into the senior peloton, with Haussler's experience in the Roubaix and Flanders rotation specifically cited as a structural fit.
For Renshaw, the move closes the loop on a cycling career that began as a sprinter for Française des Jeux and Crédit Agricole, peaked as Mark Cavendish's lead-out at HTC and QuickStep through the late 2000s and early 2010s, and continued through Belkin, Dimension Data and the closing seasons at the South African squad. He has on multiple occasions described the lead-out role as the "least understood" job in the sport, and his Astana brief was specifically a sprint-train rebuild around Yevgeniy Fedorov. Decathlon CMA CGM are betting that the same playbook can scale to a Kooij-anchored project at the WorldTour level.
The two appointments do not, on their own, change the squad's race calendar through the back end of this season. Felix Gall remains the protected Maglia Rosa card at the Giro, the Tour de France line-up confirmed earlier this week is unchanged, and the Vuelta a España roster will not be locked until early August. But the structural arrangement going into 2027 is now substantially clearer than it was a fortnight ago: a Kooij-Renshaw sprint project on one rail, a Naesen-Cosnefroy-Haussler classics group on the other, and a Gall-Seixas stage-race column running through the middle.
Serieys, speaking on the team announcement, framed the moves as the conclusion of an eighteen-month structural review. "We have been very careful not to bolt a sprint project onto a team that did not have the foundations to support one," the French general manager said. "The classics group has been the spine of this squad for ten years and we have not wanted to dilute it. With Mark and Heinrich both on the road from this week, we have the resourcing to build the third pillar without weakening the first two."