Campenaerts reveals how Visma tries to crack the Pogacar-code

Sporting director Grischa Niermann spelled out the mood to Wielerflits in a single sentence. “Our biggest dream, what we wake up to every morning and work on every day, is to defeat the best rider, perhaps of all time, Tadej Pogačar.”

It is a sentence that would have felt unthinkable on 19 July 2023. One day earlier, Jonas Vingegaard had delivered a brutal blow to Pogačar in the Tour de France time trial, before finishing the job on the Col de la Loze. The Dane saw his rival crack early on the climb and eventually put 5 minutes and 45 seconds into him. By the end of the day, Pogačar was more than seven minutes down in the general classification.

That collapse came on top of the damage inflicted a year earlier, when Jumbo-Visma had already dismantled Pogačar’s aura of invincibility on the Col du Granon and Hautacam. Two Tours, two decisive defeats, both shaped by a team that had found a way to expose his limits.

Those losses did not break Pogačar. They changed him. UAE Team Emirates manager Mauro Gianetti recently explained how the defeats to Vingegaard altered the Slovenian’s trajectory. “The second Tour he won in 2021 was so easy,” Gianetti said. “He wasn’t forced to work harder, to improve. By those wins of Vingegaard, he was forced to add a little extra everywhere. He became much more serious in his approach. But that is logical. He is reaping the benefits now.”

It paid off. Pogačar hit back in 2024 and 2025 with emphatic wins, and at no point did Vingegaard truly look in position to wrestle the Tour from him.

Visma is no longer chasing a rider who can be overpowered in a single mountain stage or undone by one bad day. They are facing a version of Pogačar sharpened by defeat, and refined by a more meticulous approach to training and nutrition.

For Visma | Lease a Bike, the dream Niermann describes is not nostalgia for earlier Tours. It is an acknowledgement that the bar has moved again, and that only by moving with it can they hope to win in July.

At the media day, it was Victor Campenaerts, never short on honesty, who offered a revealing glimpse of how the team is trying to do exactly that. Speaking to Het Nieuwsblad, the domestique for Vingegaard explained how forensic the winter work has been.

“Look, last year we tried to make the race extremely hard and still Pogačar won,” Campenaerts said. “The team’s data analysts have analysed everything. How much time did Jonas ride above his FTP in the Tour? Where do we estimate Pogačar’s FTP, and how much time did he ride above his FTP? So how many sugars did they both burn? Could it be that we put Jonas into a bigger deficit than Pogačar?”

Campenaerts likes data, but even he raised an eyebrow at the depth of it. “I’m happy I don’t have to deal with all of that,” he added. 

Even so, Campenaerts did not pretend that numbers alone can predict a Tour. 

“Everyone keeps getting better,” he said, pointing to how tight the top of the sport has become. “If you’d shown me the numbers I rode last year early in my career, I wouldn’t have said I could win a Grand Tour, but I would have been riding for the prizes in Paris-Nice. The hard part is that the top riders, like Pogačar, Vingegaard, Evenepoel and Van der Poel, keep improving year after year.”

And then there is the human layer, the part no model can stabilise. “In the Grand Tours it’s about watts per kilo,” Campenaerts said, “but it’s also about who can perform when the team management comes to your room the day before and says: tomorrow you’re going to be at the front of the peloton at this point in the race, with the rest of the team in the wheel, and you ride until there are no riders left from other teams.”

This is where Campenaerts credits Visma Lease a Bike’s performance staff. “There are riders who smash everything in training, but then it doesn’t work in a race. Our performance team is very good at spotting that: who buckles under pressure, who brings something extra to the table, who might create a negative atmosphere on the bus.”