Advantage Jonas Vingegaard at the 2025 Tour de France? 'Transformational' Visma breathing sensor approved by UCI

In what could be a massive boost for Jonas Vingegaard's hopes to reclaim the Maillot Jaune at the Tour de France later this year, a 'transformational' new breathing sensor used by Team Visma | Lease a Bike has been given the green light by the UCI following a review.

The team of superstar riders such as Vingegaard, Sepp Kuss, Matteo Jorgenson and Wout van Aert, are set to introduce a new performance metric into their training and racing toolkit: breathing — or “ventilation” — sensors. Unlike traditional data points such as power output or heart rate, this technology provides a deeper insight into an athlete’s physiological strain.

The VitalPro sensor, developed by Tymewear, is being touted as the most accurate tool for measuring exercise stress outside of laboratory conditions. With UCI approval secured, the device is poised for imminent release and could soon flood the data-driven peloton with detailed breathing analytics. In theory, it offers elite cyclists the ability to calibrate their effort and manage pain during intense performance perfectly.

“Measuring ventilation in the field, in the most accurate way currently possible, will provide us massive learnings on how the body copes with efforts in competition. These are efforts that cannot be replicated in training or in the lab,” Team Visma | Lease a Bike's Head of Performance, Mathieu Heijboer, explains in conversation with Velo. “It will help us a lot in optimising training and improving our race strategies.”

“We’ll definitely also use Tymewear in competition, but purely for data collection and learning. There’s still a lot to learn in this area,” Heijboer continues. “We’ll probably use it in the Tour de France this year too, but with no different objective as with other competition. It will just be for data and learning.”

“A reliable, accurate ventilation sensor could be as big a breakthrough as the first heart rate monitor was in the 70s,” adds Tymewear co-founder and CEO Arnar Larusson to Velo, explaining what makes their product so special. “It could even be bigger, even more transformational.”

“This UCI approval is critical for other teams adopting the sensors,” Larusson concludes. “Until now, it was a logistical headache for riders to be switching between a ‘race strap’ without a breathing sensor, and a Tymewear ‘training strap’ with the breath sensor.”