“You can’t turn up to the Tour saying you want to win, then allow your key domestiques to burn matches" - Visma's use of Wout van Aert called 'fundamentally wrong'

For Team Visma | Lease a Bike, there is no doubting what the main goal is at the 2025 Tour de France, win the Maillot Jaune with Jonas Vingegaard. Unlike rival team UAE however, who are all in for the GC with Tadej Pogacar, Visma are combining their quest with a hunt for stage wins, a tactic not everyone is convinced by.

On stage 11, it was Wout van Aert who was in the breakaway, fighting at the head of the race for a potential stage win, eventually coming home in 5th place, 53 seconds down on stage winner Jonas Abrahamsen. According to 1996 Tour de France winner and compatriot of Jonas Vingegaard, Bjarne Riis however, sending Van Aert up the road the day before such a potentially decisive day as stage 12 threatens to be was a very questionable decision by Visma.

“It doesn’t come as a surprise, but I think it’s completely wrong,” Riis laments in his Tour de France analysis for BT.dk. “You can’t turn up to the Tour saying you want to win and then allow your key domestiques to burn their matches like that. That’s jeopardising the goal. I struggle with it — to me, it’s fundamentally wrong.”

Visma's use of Van Aert and his balance of team support and personal goals was already something questioned in the Danish media early on this Tour de France, by Jonas Vingegaard's wife Trine. Although Riis acknowledges Van Aert is a superstar of a rider, the Dane doesn't believe he is a rider on the same level as he was a few years ago, and as such, should be saving himself more for the big days such as stage 12, where a summit finish atop Hautacam (a climb Van Aert has previously proven decisive) awaits this Thursday afternoon.

"We all agree that Wout is something special, capable of doing extraordinary things. But he hasn’t shown that in this Tour," concludes Riis. "He’s not as strong as he was a few years ago.”