“Five weeks is too short for good preparation” – Dumoulin believes Visma is taking a gamble with their Tour de France selection

In just over two weeks, the 2025 Tour de France will depart from Lille with a narrative that writes itself: can Jonas Vingegaard wrestle back the yellow jersey from Tadej Pogacar? After being dethroned in 2024, the Dane returns as the figurehead of a stacked Team Visma | Lease a Bike squad. But within the strength of their lineup lies a clear vulnerability, one that Tom Dumoulin believes could cost them.

Due to the loss of Christophe Laporte, Visma are set to start the Tour with three riders, Simon Yates, Wout van Aert, and Edoardo Affini, who all completed the Giro d’Italia in full just a few weeks ago. It’s a bold strategy, especially given the historical difficulty of combining the Giro and the Tour in such close succession.

“There was just an extra week between the end of the Giro and the start of the Tour back then,” said Dumoulin to Wielerflits, referencing his own double podium in 2018. “That really made a huge difference.”

The timing gap this year is five weeks. At first glance, that might seem like enough to recover, rebuild, and sharpen the legs for July. But Dumoulin explains that this window falls into a physiological and mental grey zone.

“You want to start preparing for the Tour, but you are also fucked up from the Giro. That recovery really takes a week or two. But then you only have a good two and a half weeks left before the start of the Tour, while you really want to take it easy again that last week before. So you only have a good week to a week and a half to train seriously. That is far too short. That is why that extra week in 2018 was the salvation for Froome and me to combine it well.”

The mental strain is just as important as the physical, especially in such a long race. “It's not easy mentally to be completely sharp for two times three weeks in a row. Especially to be able to muster up the courage to ride yourself completely to pieces for two times three weeks in a short period,” Dumoulin adds. “GC riders are usually resilient people. The Tour-Vuelta combination often goes well for them. The only difference is that there is a week less in between than after the Giro.”

This puts Visma’s decision in sharp focus. Affini and Van Aert were key workhorses at the Giro. Simon Yates went one better and won the whole thing. But does that mean he’s in top shape, or spent?

Dumoulin doesn’t expect disaster, if Yates and Van Aert are used wisely. “He also rides in a serving role and will let go in the sprint stages,” Dumoulin said of Yates. “In all the stages in which he does not have to help Vingegaard for as long as possible, he will experience much less stress and pressure and he will not have to go as deep physically.

“It is precisely those last few percent of going completely to hell that cause so much fatigue. If the peloton rides very hard all day and lets you go at the end, that is a completely different strain on your body than when it is a gruelling stage and you are in contention for the win.”

The same principle applies to Van Aert, who came close to his best form at the Giro. “That also applies to Van Aert. He has two roles in which he chooses days on which he turns himself inside out, such as in that stage over the Colle delle Finestre in the Giro. But he also had days in that final week when he let it go. He will do that again in the Tour.”

It’s a tactical tightrope. Visma’s provisional Tour squad, Vingegaard, Yates, Van Aert, Affini, Benoot, Campenaerts, Sepp Kuss, and Matteo Jorgenson, boasts enormous depth. But how fresh are they, really?

Compare that to UAE Team Emirates - XRG, who arrive with arguably the strongest Tour team in the post-Sky era. Pogacar is supported by Joao Almeida, Adam Yates, Marc Soler, Pavel Sivakov, Tim Wellens, Nils Politt, Jhonatan Narváez, and Domen Novak. The group is incredibly deep and Almeida in particular looks in searing form after a powerful ride at the Tour de Suisse.

In 2023, Pogacar suffered from isolation in the high mountains. In 2024, the script flipped, Vingegaard was the one without support. In 2025, both bring reinforcements.

It also sets up a fascinating personal duel: Simon Yates riding in service of Vingegaard, while his twin brother Adam is one of Pogacar’s mountain lieutenants. If either Yates finds themselves off-duty or in a breakaway, we could be in for the same civil war we saw on stage 1 of the 2023 Tour.

Then there’s the third giant: Remco Evenepoel. The Soudal – Quick-Step leader enters the Tour with the weakest of the three teams. Crucially, Mikel Landa, his most experienced mountain domestique, is out after crashing badly on Stage 1 of the Giro. Evenepoel will rely on riders with far less climbing pedigree to get through the Alps and Pyrenees, and in the recent he was far too often left isolated. On talent, he can hang with Pogacar and Vingegaard at times. On support, he is on his own.

That said, there’s no guarantee UAE’s depth will be the deciding factor. It still comes down to how Vingegaard recovers, and whether his teammates’ Giro legs hold up. As Dumoulin cautions, “It sounds crazy, but sometimes that’s better. You only have to maintain your condition from the Tour a little bit. I myself have always ridden terribly well two weeks after the Tour.

“When I went to the Benelux Tour, I really took my Tour legs with me and I was super good. But four to five weeks after the Tour is just a shitty period. And that is exactly the bridge between the Giro and the Tour. Five weeks is just too long to continue good form – which you can maintain for two months – but just too short to really reset after the Giro. That makes it so difficult.”