After months of rumors, Simon Yates has officially signed a two-year contract with Visma-Lease a Bike. The move adds yet another former Grand Tour winner to Visma’s stable of stars, and it also sets up the battle of superdomestique twins for potentially years to come as Simon supports Jonas Vingegaard while his brother Adam rides for UAE Team Emirates leader Tadej Pogačar.
“He is an excellent climber and a significant boost for our general classification squad,” Visma sports director Grischa Niermann said of the team’s new hire. “Simon will have the opportunity to go for his own results with us, but he will also be a valuable asset for the team in the mountains. We believe that with our way of working, he can reach an even higher level.”
Simon Yates has spent the entirety of his pro career with Jayco-AlUla, during which time he has generally been the team’s leading GC rider. Across his 11 seasons at the WorldTour level, the 31-year-old Brit has compiled 10 Grand Tour stage wins, with victories in all three of the three-week races. He rode with his twin brother through their first several years in the Jayco organization, before Adam left for the Ineos Grenadiers at the end of 2020.
In particularly eventful 2018, Simon Yates spent more than two weeks in the race lead at the Giro d’Italia, winning three stages in the process before suffering a massive crack on stage 19 – the famed Chris Froome raid – and dropping out of the GC top 20 by the finish in Rome, but then he bounced back a few months later to win the overall title at the Vuelta a España. Since that big year, he has had some ups and downs as a GC specialist, landing on one more Grand Tour podium (at the Giro in 2021) and winning several Grand Tour stages but never coming close to repeating the kind of success he had at the 2018 Vuelta.
“Despite the great time I have had with my current team, I felt it was time to change teams to keep improving myself and get the most out of myself,” Yates said of his coming switch. Yates and the team are hoping for a similar trajectory to past Visma signings like Christophe Laporte and Matteo Jorgenson, both established pros who hit new heights after joining the team.
With the arrival of Yates, Visma will have three Grand Tour winners on the team roster along with Vingegaard and Sepp Kuss. As Visma’s snakebitten 2024 campaign showed, you can never have too much firepower for the Grand Tours. Injuries and illness – and the departure of Primož Roglič to Bora-Hansgrohe – left Vingegaard with a significantly less imposing support squad around him during the 2024 Tour de France compared to previous years of dominance. Meanwhile, UAE looked stronger than perhaps ever before in the team’s history.
Now, whatever chances he gets to ride for himself outside during other parts of the season, Simon Yates will likely be pitted against his own twin when the two teams square off in the high mountains at the Tour. The Yates brothers already treated fans to an entertaining battle of the brothers in the 2023 Tour, when Adam pipped Simon for victory in the opening stage.
Moving forward, we could see each brother taking big pulls for their respective teammates as Pogačar and Vingegaard continue to face each other for years to come.
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