'A good moment to leave my comfort zone' - Tiesj Benoot on life after Visma

Tiesj Benoot had two decisions to make last summer. The first, leaving Visma | Lease a Bike, was a torturous one. The second, joining Decathlon CMA CGM, was rather more straightforward. 

“It was for sure difficult to leave Visma, because I didn’t have a real reason to leave,” Benoot tells Domestique. “I was happy there, and I was a proud member of the team for four years. But in the end, I had to make a choice, and I think it’s the last time in my career I can really make this step. I’ve signed for three years with Decathlon, so I’ll be almost 35 years old when the contract ends. It just felt like a good moment to step out of my comfort zone again.”

His previous moves have certainly been well timed. After developing in the Lotto system, Benoot moved to Sunweb ahead of the 2020 season. Two years at a team renowned for its attention to detail prepared him for the move to Jumbo-Visma, as it was then known, in 2022. “When I’ve changed team before, it’s always been something that felt good from the beginning,” he says. “It always gave me a boost, and I hope it will have the same effect now.”

Benoot is speaking on the road back home to Ghent after a testing session with his new team on the track at Zolder. His first training camp with Decathlon will come next month, but the initial impressions, both from meetings in the autumn and from this week’s work, have been encouraging. 

Much has been made of Decathlon’s increased budget from next year, with the management adamant that the injection of cash will help them join the ranks of the peloton’s so-called ‘super teams.’ Benoot doesn’t pretend that an attractive financial package didn’t play a part in his transfer, but he insists that a bigger budget only elevates a team if the money is allocated to the right places.

“You need the money, but you also need a good philosophy and good management that knows how to set priorities,” he says. “Of course, you can spend a budget on stupid salaries or on salaries for riders you don’t need. But I think on this team, there’s a clear vision on where they want to go, which type of riders they want, and in which domains of performance they want to improve.

“For example, today we did a track test, and there were maybe seven or eight staff members there to make sure everything went well. That means they’re all staying in a hotel for four or five days, so that’s a big investment. In the past, only the really top teams could do that, but now teams like Decathlon, Lidl-Trek and Red Bull are bringing up the level of competition.”

Decathlon identified Benoot as a key signing early this year, and with good reason. The Belgian was a mainstay for Visma | Lease a Bike these past four years, a perennial fixture at the business end of Classics and then utterly reliable in support of Jonas Vingegaard each July at the Tour de France. Benoot essentially offered something of a two-for-one deal for Decathlon, doubling as a leader for the cobbled Classics and a savvy road captain for the Tour.

“They want me to bring my experience in the Classics but then ride the Tour in more of a captain role,” Benoot explains. “I’ll have a bit more of a leadership role and a bit more freedom in the Classics, though I have to say I never had the feeling at Visma that I had to sacrifice myself too early in the race either.”

Benoot points to his part in Vingegaard’s two Tour wins and his own 2023 triumph at Kuurne-Brussel-Kuurne as his personal highlights from his time at Visma. “Kuurne was something really special because I had broken my neck the previous summer,” says Benoot, though – ever the team man – his low points were the misfortunes of others. “Nathan Van Hooydonck’s car crash was for sure the worst moment, and then from a sporting point of view, it was probably Wout van Aert’s crash at Dwars door Vlaanderen [in 2024 – ed.] That was very hard to take.”

Benoot struck up an especially close relationship with Van Aert during his four-year tenure at Visma, labouring with his compatriot on interminable altitude camps before the Classics and then serving tours of duty together on Vingegaard’s behalf in July. 

“Wout’s win in Calais [on the 2022 Tour] is one of my nicest memories from the team, but in the end, it was just nice to have a good friend on the team,” Benoot says. “That’s something I’ll miss, but it’s not the end of the world – we’re just on different teams.”

In Flanders in Spring, mind, a high-profile setback can feel like the end of the world, and Benoot had a box seat for Van Aert’s surprise defeat at Dwars door Vlaanderen in April, when Neilson Powless claimed to spoils despite being outnumbered three to one by Visma riders in the winning move. 

Even now, Benoot has no quibble with Visma’s decision to ride for Van Aert rather than attack Powless one by one.  “I knew a bit what was going on in Wout’s head, with all the difficult injuries he’d had the year before, and all the doubts and difficulties,” he says. “I really wanted him to win, it would have been a great way to turn the page. But we just talked about it straight afterwards, and I think by that evening, he was the only one still struggling with it.”

The weight of being Wout is one that Benoot himself is glad not to have to carry, having observed at close quarters the adulation and the expectation heaped upon his old teammate. “It’s really special to see how popular he is,” Benoot says. “But it’s something I wouldn’t want to have to cope with.” 

Benoot’s modest finishing speed means he has only won four races as a professional, including a snowbound Strade Bianche in 2018, but that relatively paltry victory column is offset by his astonishing consistency across a range of terrains. His back catalogue includes podium finishes at Amstel Gold Race, the Clásica de San Sebastián and Paris-Nice. In 2025, he followed up third at Dwars door Vlaanderen and sixth at the Tour of Flanders with a series of placings in hilly Classics. 

Although Benoot insists he never felt hemmed in by team orders at Visma, it’s clear that he will enjoy protected status at Decathlon, though the jury is out as to whether that will be a pro or a con come the Spring. A decade or so ago, QuickStep repeatedly brought their strength in numbers to bear in the Classics, but Benoot reckons the sheer difficulty of the current Tour of Flanders route and the outlandish strength of men like Tadej Pogacar and Mathieu van der Poel means that team tactics are of limited value in the finale of the Ronde.

“I benefited from being with Visma in a race like Dwars door Vlaanderen this year or at Kuurne-Brussel-Kuurne the year I won it, but if you’re talking specifically about Flanders, then the problem is they have made this race so hard,” Benoot says. “And then Pogacar’s team is so strong, so they want to make it even harder for him, and it ends up being man to man.”

The extended finale of this year’s Ronde starkly illustrated Benoot’s point. Together with Matteo Jorgenson and Wout van Aert, he worked to chase down Pogacar, Van der Poel and Mads Pedersen, but they could make no inroads into their deficit until the terrain eased ahead of the Kruisberg. Once the road climbed again, however, the raw power of the men in front told all over again. A race that once lent itself to ingenuity – think Nick Nuyens picking off Fabian Cancellara on the old course in 2011 – now comes down to the biggest engine. 

“You don’t have any recovery because the last 45-50k is one climb after the other. And in the end, Pogacar just dropped Van der Poel from his wheel…” Benoot says. “You cannot imagine that something like Nuyens’ win would happen again. You cannot imagine ten guys coming back together after the Paterberg.

“If I remember correctly, since the new course came in back in 2012, the group in front on the Paterberg goes to the finish. Nobody was ever able to come back. That tells us something about how hard the race actually is – everybody’s just fucked after the climbs.”

When Benoot scored a sparkling fifth place on his debut a decade ago, he looked like a future Ronde winner in waiting, but the game has changed dramatically in the meantime. Benoot’s power numbers from recent seasons would likely have carried him to victory back in 2015, but the bar has since been raised to an almost absurd standard by Pogacar and Van der Poel. 

Like many, Benoot pinpoints the initial spike in speeds and intensity in the 2020s to the high-octane resumption of racing after the COVID-19 lockdown, and like many, he has strived to keep pace with developments in technology and nutrition across the seasons. His own rise in level, he reckons, has broadly been in line with the prevailing trends in the peloton, but the presence of an elite cadre of individuals has complicated life for everyone else.

“The increased carb intake was a big change and if you had known that ten years ago, you’d have had a huge advantage,” he says. “But for me, the biggest change in the last years has been the extremely talented individuals. If one of these guys is there without one of the other ‘aliens,’ as I would call them, they’re almost sure to win the race. It’s really exceptional to have a few guys standing that much above the other guys – and then one guy even more ahead of the second guy. But the general level of the bunch is so much higher too.”

At Decathlon, Benoot will link up with the man mostly likely to break into the exclusive club at the top of the pyramid. Paul Seixas is still only 19 years of age, but Decathlon’s future plans are being built around him. He has yet to ride the Tour, but the home nation has already turned its lonely eyes to Seixas in the expectation that he can end the forty years (and counting) of hurt since Bernard Hinault’s 1985 win.

“My first impression is that he’s just a young kid still,” Benoot says. “But he’s really down to earth, a nice guy. And unlike a lot of young guys in the bunch, he’s not only talking about power numbers and carbs, which is really good, because my biggest advice for him would be to search for something outside of cycling. It’s important to have a hobby, or at least something else you’re really interested in – whether it’s studying at university or going fishing or whatever, it doesn’t matter.”

Benoot has already practiced what he preached. He was already considered a blue-chip talent when he turned pro with Lotto in 2015, and his stock rose still further after his Tour of Flanders debut, but he stuck steadfastly to his preordained plan of completing his economics degree from the University of Ghent. Only the other week, meanwhile, Benoot put in an appearance to launch a reading week at Merelbeke library. It’s never been just about the bike – or at least, it shouldn’t be.

“With young riders, it’s sometimes really scary to see that they have only cycling in their lives, and when they come home, their social circle is really, really small,” Benoot says. “So I would say it’s important to keep your friends from school, from high school, put effort into them, make time for them. 

“We cannot take away the pressure, I think, so you just need to handle it. In the end, some people are made for it, and some are not, and that’s a talent in itself. Remco, for example, is a really good example of somebody who handles pressure really well, he even gains energy from it, but there are other guys who really suffer with it. So my advice would be to keep the people around you that you like and find something else you like to do on the side.”

Benoot’s career has coincided with what he terms the “data evolution,” an era in which every pedal stroke can be calibrated, parsed and analysed. “Now that everything is measured, it’s harder to keep the pleasure in what you do,” he says. Amid that flood of information, a man could easily flounder, but he has always stayed moored to a safe haven in his native Ghent. 

“I come from a family which had nothing to do with cycling. My brother is a professional ballet dancer, which is a whole different world,” Benoot says. “The friends I have since I was 14, 15 years old are still the best friends I have today, and at home with my girlfriend, we almost never talk about cycling.”

The next necessary evolution in pro cycling, Benoot reckons, will come in the form of psychological support. Initiatives like Visma’s invitation of families to altitude camps are, he maintains, a step in the right direction for a sport that has been wringing every last ounce from its riders over the past decade.

“We all start cycling because it’s our hobby, something we like to do as a kid. But for some riders, they turn professional, win some nice races and then the fun disappears, and they stop early because they lose pleasure in what they do because they have to handle so much,” says Benoot, who has preferred a more judicious approach to his profession. “Cycling is my passion, I really like to be in the race, and I like to train. But you need to have balance in life to make sure you don’t lose that passion along the way.”

Benoot’s instincts haven’t led him astray yet.