Visma | Lease a Bike and Ineos Grenadiers suspended radio communications broadcast during Tour de France after stage 17

After the seventeenth stage of the Tour de France, it appears that both Visma | Lease a Bike and Ineos Grenadiers have immediately suspended their arrangement to broadcast radio communications with the race organisers ASO.

With just three days left to go of the 2024 race, however, they’ve already cut the cables. "From yesterday we suspended it until after the Tour," Jasper Saeijs, marketing manager at Visma | Lease a Bike, told CyclingWeekly. "We had a lot of discussions about strategies being communicated, what is affecting the race and not, and we think we need to sort that out better, then we can look to the future."

A team of three people receive audios from the 15 participating teams and decide what should be broadcast on TV, with a delay of between 15 and 30 minutes. Saeijs said there wasn’t any specific incident in the last week that had forced the team to make their decision, but that "it was counting up every day, and we decided to just suspend and look after the Tour to see if it’s possible or not to continue, and also the way to continue."

He added: "We don’t really have a problem with ASO but we look at things differently. One thing is we can’t trust the process for the upcoming stages that they can make a good decision on what is strategy and what is affecting the race or not. We are still in favour of everything that can engage fans in the sport... we are really pro fan engagement... but it can’t affect the race and the race strategy, and in our opinion it did this too much."

"We are not the only team, there are more teams that don’t really like how it is going." Several sources confirmed to CyclingWeekly that Ineos Grenadiers have also revoked access, although there's not official confirmation. In addition multiple teams expressed their disappointment about the €5,000 they are given for handing over access to their team radios, but Visma insist that the financial remuneration was not a part of their decision.