Richard Plugge pushes back on Visma burnout claims

Plugge starts by separating cases that are often thrown into one pile. “I don’t think you can compare the situations of Fem van Empel, Tom Dumoulin and Simon Yates,” he said to Wielerrevue, stressing that the causes and contexts differ from rider to rider. 

Still, he calls it a real theme inside the sport. “But we certainly think about the phenomenon of burnout in cycling.”

His main pushback is that Visma’s reputation for an intense, highly structured approach is only one part of the picture. He points instead to something deliberately human: “I think we were the first team that allowed family to come on altitude camps,” Plugge said. Not as a perk, but as a way to keep riders mentally steady in the periods when the sport can feel most enclosed. “We certainly pay attention to that and it works too.”

Vingegaard’s case underlines the point. The two-time Tour de France winner is often seen as the purest product of Visma’s detail driven system, yet even he flagged last season that the workload and expectations were starting to weigh on him. The message was heard, and the team altered his planning rather than forcing him to simply push through.

Plugge’s comments follow recent remarks from former Visma | Lease a Bike riders, who have responded to Yates’ departure and to the team’s way of working.

Tom Dumoulin, for instance, told El País: “Visma is the most professional and advanced team in the world, even more so than Pogačar’s UAE. They base everything on data, on detailed analysis. Their system is so finely tuned and everything is so structured that at times you can feel caged as a cyclist.” 

He then pushed the point further: “That obsession isn’t inherently bad, as the results clearly show, but at the same time it creates such a heavy atmosphere that the pressure ends up suffocating you.”

Cian Uijtdebroeks has also reflected on the structure at Visma | Lease a Bike since his move to Movistar. Speaking to Sporza, he said: “I asked at the time if I could do longer blocks, but that was difficult within their system. You had very little say. That was hard for me.”

He continued: “Since Merijn Zeeman left, it became even more disciplined. For some riders, that works. Someone like Jonas Vingegaard prefers it that way, it takes the stress away for him, but for a rider like me it does not. I really want to be involved in decisions about my training, gearing and race schedule.”