"To beat Pogacar, everything has to be right" - Thijs Zonneveld comments on lack of Dutch riders in Visma's planned 2025 Tour de France lineup

The 2025 Tour de France looks set to be one of the most highly anticipated and hyped editions of the Grand Tour spectacle in many years. Can Tadej Pogacar continue his dominance or will Jonas Vingegaard be able to reclaim the Maillot Jaune?

Since their recent press day, Team Visma | Lease a Bike's proposed lineup for the Tour de France has been widely reported with the likes of Matteo Jorgenson, Tiesj Benoot, Simon Yates, Sepp Kuss, Victor Campenaerts, Christophe Laporte and Wout van Aert set to support Vingegaard. The lack of Dutch riders in the Dutch-based team has been a hot topic in Visma's homeland though, but according to ex-pro turned expert Thijs Zonneveld, Visma's team needs to be the best, regardless of a rider's nationality.

"Unlike teams in other sports, almost all cycling teams lack a physical base. No club, no stadium, no training complex. Nationality often depends more or less on the people who lead the team, on the license, on the sponsors and on something as intangible as culture," Zonneveld writes in his column for Algemeen Dagblad. "Many fans identify more with riders than with teams. And yet: the nationality of a team is not irrelevant either. Certainly not during the Tour, when millions of viewers fall from the sky who hardly watch cycling the rest of the year."

"Visma has only one goal in July: to win the Tour," Zonneveld continues. "To beat Tadej Pogacar, everything has to be right. There is no room to take flags into account. And if you look at the selection they want to take to the Tour, the conclusion is quite simple: a monstrously good team."

"Cycling in the Netherlands has been under pressure for years; there are fewer and fewer competitions and fewer and fewer young people who join a cycling club," adds the analyst. "And even though teams like Visma and Picnic PostNL do their best to attract Dutch talent, it seems to become more difficult every year, if only because the pond they fish from is getting smaller. For all those people who feel hurt in their national pride when Dutch cycling teams cycle around without Dutch people: get used to it."