The peloton's favorite cult hero lines up for his eighth Tour as Lidl-Trek's on-road brain, the man who reads the wind, marshals the train and still sneaks into the odd breakaway at 35. His 2026 nearly unraveled before it began — illness at Paris-Nice wiped out his first spring classics campaign in over a decade — but the Latvian road captain is back where the team needs him most. Every GC bid needs an adult in the room; Skujiņš is theirs.
Palmarès
- Three Tour of California stage wins (2015, 2016, 2018) + mountains classification (2018)
- Tre Valli Varesine winner (2018)
- Wore the Tour de France polka-dot jersey for five days (2018)
- Latvian road race champion (2019, 2021, 2025); five-time Latvian TT champion
- Olympic Games road race 5th, Paris (2024)
Cut-out factHe's married to former American pro racer Abigail Mickey, and 2026 was the first year in more than ten that he missed the cobbled classics — he jokes he was 'impressed the streak lasted that long'.
The squad
Riding the 2026 Tour with Juan Ayuso, Derek Gee-West, Mads Pedersen, Quinn Simmons, Mattias Skjelmose, Mathias Vacek, Carlos Verona — see the full Lidl-Trek team page.
Portrait: AI paper-collage render (gpt-image-2) after a reference photograph — source: Wikimedia Commons, author: Mārtiņš Bruņenieks, license: CC BY-SA 4.0.
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