TOUR·KINETIC

Pinarello-Q36.5 Pro Cycling · staff profile
Founder and general manager
Douglas Ryder

The South African team builder taking another run at the Tour with a sharper Swiss-backed, Pidcock-led project.

Douglas Ryder paper-collage staff portrait

Douglas Ryder is best known for building Africa's first Tour de France team through the MTN-Qhubeka/Dimension Data/NTT lineage. That project carried enormous symbolic weight, delivered Tour stage wins, and put African cycling into the centre of the sport's biggest race before eventually collapsing under sponsorship pressure.

Ryder's return with Q36.5, now sharpened by Pinarello and a roster led by Tom Pidcock, is a second act. The project is less sentimental and more performance-branded, but it still carries Ryder's obsession with giving a team identity beyond a sponsor logo.

At the 2026 Tour, Q36.5 has to prove it belongs on results, not backstory. Ryder's job is to make the team look ambitious but disciplined: Pidcock for stages and GC flashes, experienced riders for support, and enough presence to turn a wildcard into momentum.

Why it mattersRyder knows how hard it is to build a Tour team from outside the old power centres because he has already done it once.

Sources

The squad

Douglas Ryder is part of the Pinarello-Q36.5 Pro Cycling story at the 2026 Tour — see the full team page.

Portrait: AI paper-collage render (gpt-image-2) after a public reference image — source: en.wikipedia.org, author/source: servicekoers.be, license/status: reference source; see source. A fan project — not affiliated with the Tour de France or A.S.O.