At the conclusion of the spring classics, Team Jayco AlUla had taken six victories on the season, with the Swiss road and time trial champion Mauro Schmid accounting for four of those wins.
Veteran Michael Matthews opened the team’s account in January with a tough uphill sprint victory at Gran Premio Castellón in Spain. Unfortunately the Australian rider's spring campaign came to an abrupt halt in early March when a serious crash during training resulted in fractures to both wrists. Following surgery and six weeks of recovery, Matthews was recently able to return to the bike and resume his training.
Also in January, Schmid finished second overall at the Santos Tour Down Under, followed by a strong fourth-place finish at the Cadel Evans Great Ocean Road Race.
In Oman, Schmid beat out Adam Yates (UAE Team Emirates–XRG) in a two-up sprint to win the one-day Muscat Classic, where he was joined on the podium by teammate Luke Plapp. Schmid went on to win Stage 3 of the Tour of Oman atop the summit of Eastern Mountain, wearing the race leader’s jersey for a day.
Plapp reached the podium again in the Middle East when he finished third overall at the UAE Tour, largely on the strength of a second-place finish at the top of Jebel Hafeet, the race’s decisive climb.
In late March, Schmid won the final stage at Settimana Internazionale Coppi e Bartali in Italy to snatch the overall victory. Heading into the fifth and final stage, he had finished second on three occasions and was sitting second overall, just two second behind overall leader Axel Laurance of Ineos Grenadiers.
Aboard his all-new Propel Advanced SL with a CADEX Max 50 WheelSystem, Schmid and teammate Alan Hatherly rode clear of the field before they were joined by Laurance, and in a two-up sprint between the two GC contenders, Schmid took the stage win and 10 bonus seconds to seal the overall victory in dramatic style. Third place on the stage was enough for Hatherly to join his teammate on the podium, finishing third overall.
“I think it was the perfect ending to this week,” said Schmid. “Being up there with Alan at the end was really fun and the whole team rode amazing. I'm really happy to finally repay them with a victory, winning the general classification like this is super nice.”
In late March, German Pascal Ackermann finished a narrow second place in a sprint finish at Bredene Koksijde Classic in Belgium.
The team’s most recent victory came in mid-April when Danish rider Anders Foldager took the reduced bunch uphill sprint victory at Brabantse Pijl, the Belgian semi-classic that connects the cobblestone classics with the Ardennes.
“This means a lot to me,” Foldager said. He credited Schmid, who sacrificed his own chances to help close the gap to the race leaders in the final kilometers. “This is the biggest victory of my career. It shows me and the team that I have the level to compete in this type of race."
In the days that followed Brabantse Pijl, Schmid finished sixth at the Amstel Gold Race in the Netherlands and was then second atop the Mur du Huy at Belgium's La Flèche Wallonne. The Swiss rider also notched a second-place finish at the NXT Classic, a Dutch one-day race held in early April. In all, he had four wins and six second-place finishes from his first 24 race days in 2026.
What to Watch For
At the conclusion of the spring classics, Schmid was ranked sixth in the world in the 2026 UCI rankings. He was picked to be the leader for Team Jayco AlUla at the Tour de Romandie, where he's aiming to win stages on home soil in the Swiss national champion’s jersey.
The focus of the season now shifts toward the Giro d’Italia, where Team Jayco AlUla will field a squad built around supporting Ben O'Connor, a winner of stages at all three Grand Tours and a fourth-place finisher at the 2024 Giro. Ackermann will also chase after victory in the sprint stages, while Hatherly, the mountain-bike world champion, is on the team’s long list to make his Grand Tour debut.
"It'll be a whole new adventure for me," Hatherly told Cyclingnews. "It'd be about trying to survive three weeks in a Grand Tour. It's a completely massive project but it'll be super exciting to try the next step in my road career."
The Giro d’Italia begins in Bulgaria on May 8 and concludes in Rome on May 31.
Team Jayco AlUla 2026 Giro d'Italia Roster
Pascal Ackermann
Koen Bouwman
Bob Donaldsdon
Felix Engelhardt
Alan Hatherly
Chris Juul-Jensen
Ben O'Connor
Andrea Vendrame