Finally, the sponsor photoshoot we’ve been waiting for has seen the light of day.
Photos: Wout Beel for Soudal-Quickstep
Across the months-long, continent-hopping pro calendar, you’d be forgiven for thinking that the climax of the cycling season comes at the Tour de France. Or the Spring Classics. Or maybe the World Championships.
In each of these cases, you’d be wrong. The height of athletic endeavour comes not in any of these mere bicycle races, but at a team camp in Calpe, Spain, in December.
Each year, Soudal-QuickStep heads to their little training camp to mingle with media, to snap a fresh round of rider headshots, and dial in their sponsor talking points (“now class, repeat after me: Safety Joggers put the ‘fun’ in ‘functional’”).
And then? Well, there’s really no other way to put it: they beat the shit out of each other with latex pillows while a solemn Belgian takes photographs of it all.
This QuickStep tradition has been going on for decades, through a couple of different sponsors. The definitive pillow photoshoot provider is Latexco, but when that company was victim of a merger, the Italian company Manifattura Falomo stepped into the breach from 2024 onwards. We have no way of knowing the specifics of how this fourth-tier ‘official partnership’ deal was sold to the Italians, but we can probably assume that at least at some level, the powers behind the team wanted continuity on the pillowfight photoshoot front.
We also know from interviewing QuickStep alumni, Kasper Asgreen, some key details of how this event usually goes down. Summarised:
there are “no rules”
“the pillows get destroyed because we are swinging so hard that the latex rips, of course” (it’s the ‘of course’ that really gets me there, like it’s so obvious it’s practically unspoken)
and, Tractor Enthusiast Yves Lampaert is the biggest threat in a pillowfight thanks to his jujitsu training (“I don’t know how the fuck he manages to do it, but he manages to get the swings in that the rest of us can’t avoid”)
It’s pillow fight season!
A QuickStep pillow fight veteran shares the inside story of cycling’s greatest photo shoot.
Those are the broad shapes, but until the release of the latest batch of photos each year, we never really know what violence went down: who copped a pummelling, who inflicted the hurt, and whether the final outcome was laughter or tears.
Until this week, that is – because the 2026 QuickStep Pillowfight photoshoot has finally dropped.
Let’s unpack the winners and the losers of this latest crop.
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