Piganzoli replaces Van Aert in Visma's Tour de France team

Davide Piganzoli will complete the Visma | Lease a Bike team for the Tour de France, replacing the absent Wout van Aert in the eight man roster, the team has confirmed to Domestique.

The Italian joined Visma this season from Polti VisitMalta, and he caught the eye at the Giro d’Italia, where he finished eighth overall while helping Jonas Vingegaard to a crushing overall victory. 

Piganzoli went on to win a stage and the overall at the Route d’Occitanie last weekend, but he downplayed the idea that he would be called up to replace Van Aert. The 23-year-old was not initially slated to ride two Grand Tours in 2026, but Van Aert’s withdrawal has seen him drafted into Vingegaard’s supporting cast at the Tour.

Van Aert was ruled out of the Tour due to an infection in an elbow wound that he picked up in a training crash ahead of the Tour Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes. Although he won a stage at the rebranded Dauphiné, Van Aert abandoned the following day. 

He later spent a night in hospital when the wound became infected, and Visma later announced that Van Aert would miss the Tour for the first time since he joined the team in 2019.

The addition of Piganzoli to the roster means that half of the Visma team will be combining the Giro and Tour, as Sepp Kuss and Victor Campenaerts also raced alongside Vingegaard in Italy in May.

The team is completed by Matteo Jorgenson, Bruno Armirail, Edoardo Affini and Per Strand Hagenes, who all lined up at the Dauphiné. 

As reported by Het Laatste Nieuws earlier this month, Strand Hagenes was brought into the Tour line-up to replace the absent Christophe Laporte. 

Ben Tulett, who impressed at the Dauphiné, was believed to be under consideration to replace Van Aert at the Tour, but Visma have ultimately opted to stick with the original plan of saving the Briton for the Vuelta a España.

In keeping with recent tradition, the bulk of Visma’s Tour squad has been training together at altitude in Tignes over the past week. 

Visma’s Tour squad is built entirely around the aspirations of Vingegaard, who is seeking to become only the ninth man in history to complete the Giro-Tour double. He is also chasing a third Tour victory after wearing yellow to Paris in 2022 and 2023.

Vingegaard has never finished lower than second in his five Tours to date, and he again lines up as the man most likely to challenge the hegemony of favourite Tadej Pogačar. 

Unlike his crash-interrupted seasons of 2024 and 2025, the Dane has enjoyed a clear run so far in 2026, winning Paris-Nice and the Volta a Catalunya before cruising to five stage victories and a crushing overall triumph at the Giro.