‘The computer models kept showing it would work’ - Visma and Vingegaard stun Tour rivals with bold TTT strategy

In Barcelona, Visma | Lease a Bike won the team time trial with a plan that went against the usual logic of the discipline. For the first part of the course, Vingegaard, Sepp Kuss and Giulio Piganzoli were kept out of the wind. The bigger riders did the pulling. The climbers waited.

It looked risky, but it had been planned in detail.

For Mathieu Heijboer, Visma’s head of performance, the win hit hard. He had to fight back his emotions after the finish. Partly because of the pressure, partly because of what it meant for Vingegaard.

“It was the tension,” Heijboer told Het Nieuwsblad. “A lot came out at once.”

Vingegaard had not worn yellow since winning the Tour in 2023. After his heavy crash in the Tour of the Basque Country in 2024, the moment carried extra meaning inside the team.

“After everything he has been through, this is so deserved,” Heijboer said. “Do not forget that at that moment he really thought he was dying. That injury was so serious. Only this year does he feel that he is truly back. To close that chapter like this is beautiful.”

The tactical plan had not come out of nowhere. Visma had already discussed the idea with Vingegaard during the Giro and later tested a similar approach in the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, where they also won the team time trial. After that, Heijboer said, the team was convinced.

“Before that, we had already thought about it extensively,” he said. “In the Giro, we had even talked Jonas through it. But after the Dauphiné, we knew for sure: this is how we would do it in the Tour. This would be the plan.”

The first fifteen kilometres were largely carried by Victor Campenaerts, Edoardo Affini, Bruno Armirail, Per Strand Hagenes and Matteo Jorgenson. The idea was to let the riders with more power handle the flatter roads, while Vingegaard, Kuss and Piganzoli stayed fresh for later.

Heijboer called it “a very daring tactic”, but the numbers backed it up. Jamie Lowden, the British aerodynamics specialist who joined Visma in late 2024, had played a major role in the preparation.

“Together with Jamie, we put a huge amount of work into this,” Heijboer said. “We looked at and calculated everything. We worked with all kinds of models, and those computer models kept showing that this approach would work very well.”

Still, the road is not a spreadsheet. Vingegaard admitted he was not fully comfortable with the pace at the start.

“I really believed in the tactic,” he said in quotes collected by In de Leiderstrui. “But when we had a strong headwind, it sometimes felt as if we were almost riding comfortably. In the first two kilometres I thought: I think we should be going faster. But when they told us on the radio that we had the fastest intermediate times, I knew it was good.”

The Dane later said the power numbers told another story. “Even in the wheels it was still very hard. But when you have five big, strong guys with you, they can handle those flat sections so much better. We had to use them there, because Sepp, Davide and I could not do much there except slow them down if we went to the front.” 

There was one awkward moment. Sepp Kuss had to come through earlier than planned. In the end, that helped Visma keep Jorgenson in the group for longer, which mattered on the descent.

“That was super valuable,” Heijboer said. “It meant we could keep Matteo on board until after the first climb. That was crucial. Matteo had to take care of the descent towards the final climb. With only three guys of sixty kilos, we would never have gone fast enough there. But it worked out perfectly.”

Jorgenson lost 2 minutes and 30 seconds by the finish, but Visma had accepted that risk. His time was the price of a plan built around the stage win, Vingegaard and an early strike in the general classification.