“It’s clear this year we’ve been overtaken by UAE Team Emirates" - Visma LAB admit there is much room for improvement after major drop off in 2024

In 2023, Team Visma | Lease a Bike were on top of the cycling world. Becoming the first team to win all three Grand Tours in the same season, the likes of Jonas Vingegaard, Primoz Roglic, Sepp Kuss, Wout van Aert, Christophe Laporte and more were all in top form. This year however, it's not quite been the same.

With Roglic departing for a new challenge at Red Bull - BORA - hansgrohe, Vingegaard saw his Tour de France preparations disrupted by a major crash, Kuss missed the Tour altogether through Covid, Van Aert has had a seemingly constant stream of bad luck and injuries this year, although he has thankfully regained his winning ways at the Vuelta a Espana and Laporte has basically been non-existent. Add to that, almost all squad members crashing, being injured or leaving races through illness, Visma have been completely unable to gather momentum in 2024.

“It’s clear this year we’ve been overtaken by UAE Team Emirates for whatever reason,” Team Visma | Lease a Bike's Mathieu Heijboer admits in conversation with Velo. “That’s just how the facts are. We were at the top last year, but these things don’t always last. It’s never easy to stay at the top."

“Crashes didn’t help us this year, but that’s not all of it," continues Heijboer, well aware that there is much room for improvement for Team Visma | Lease a Bike ahead of the 2025 campaign. “The most important is that we have a vision to improve. We’re building that vision for 2025 already.”

Whilst, as mentioned, bad luck has consistently scuppered Visma's momentum this year, Heijboer insists it's too simplistic to put the entire blame on that reasoning. “There are valid reasons for us falling back this year, and there are good reasons for some of our leaders not getting results we wanted,” he explains. “But it would be too easy to always say it’s because of crashes. We are being very critical internally on what we’ve done this year.”

So what is the biggest difference between UAE Team Emirates and Team Visma | Lease a Bike currently then? “UAE doesn’t seem to be doing a specific thing different to us. It’s not like they have a better training method or ‘secret’," Heijboer says. “What they seem to have done is found a very good way of working with a deep pool of very talented riders and have done very well with the recruitment.”

“The roster UAE has and particularly the second line of riders they have is really, really strong. And those guys have also really stepped up in winning races whenever Tadej Pogacar isn’t there,” Heijboer concludes. “That depth is one of their [UAE’s] biggest strengths. We have big champions everywhere and more coming up, but not like that.”