After a 2024 campaign that team boss Richard Plugge charitably described as “challenging and eventful,” Visma-Lease a Bike is ready to put disappointment in the rearview mirror and start fresh in 2025.
With a handful of fresh faces, and longer-tenured stalwarts like Wout van Aert and Jonas Vingegaard now (mostly) recovered from the crashes that derailed them last season, the squad that dominated the men’s peloton just two years ago has lofty aspirations of a return to form.
“Our main objective is to win the Tour de France again,” said head of racing Grischa Niermann. “Additionally, we hope to achieve our dream of winning the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix.” Both races have so far eluded the team in its post-Rabobank era, although Dylan van Baarle did win Roubaix riding for Ineos Grenadiers.
Add to those goals that the squad already has an idea of how it will approach the beginning of the season and the other two Grand Tours, and it’s clear that Visma-Lease Bike is looking to take every opportunity throughout the season to bounce back after UAE Team Emirates dethroned them as the sport’s top team in 2024.
The first set of big targets will come in the form of the spring Classics, where the main talking point may simply be staying healthy. Visma’s Classics squad, largely unchanged from the one that had similarly high expectations last year, is hoping for a do-over round after a pile-up at Dwars door Vlaanderen knocked out team leader Wout van Aert in 2024. Van Aert proceeded to crash again at the Vuelta a España later in the season, but he is working back to top shape now, having recently nabbed his first wins of this cyclocross campaign.
Together with Matteo Jorgenson, whose win at the aforementioned Dwars was a bright spot in an otherwise frustrating time, and Christophe Laporte, who battled illness last spring, Van Aert and Visma have their sights set on the biggest cobbled races. As Van Aert put it, “Last year’s disappointment has only fueled my motivation for the Monuments.”
Van Aert’s focus on the pavé of northern Europe means that in the one Monument that he has actually won in the past, Milan-San Remo, Visma will look to Olav Kooij as the expected team leader instead. Van Aert also seems set to skip Strade Bianche, another race he has won before.
In any case, Van Aert will continue to play a role when the time comes for Visma – and cycling generally – to pivot towards the three-week races. The Belgian plans to make his Giro d’Italia debut this spring after his crash prevented that from happening last year, and he will target stages alongside Kooij in the Italian Grand Tour as Visma looks to newcomer Simon Yates as GC leader two years removed from the last time the squad won the race with Primož Roglič, who has since left for Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe.
Yates, perhaps Visma’s marquee signing of the transfer season, arrives from Jayco-AlUla as a former podium finisher at the Giro, and a former winner of the Vuelta a España too. The 32-year-old Brit will look to build on his past success at the Giro, where Roglič is probably the top rival in a strong field, before slotting into a different role in the next three-week race on the calendar, the Tour de France.
Two-time Tour winner Vingegaard will lead the squad hoping that a healthy run-up to the race will put him in position to take on defending champion Tadej Pogačar this season after his preparation for the 2024 Tour was derailed by a serious crash at the Itzulia Basque Country. His Tour buildup will start at the Volta ao Algarve and will also include Paris-Nice, the Volta a Catalunya, and the Critérium du Dauphiné.
Sepp Kuss, Van Aert, Yates, and Jorgenson are among those expected to ride alongside Vingegaard in Visma’s Tour squad. Jorgenson, in particular, will make the start with an eye towards his own results in addition to helping Vingegaard.
His 2025 calendar will again feature a mix of one-day events and stage races after he proved capable on a variety of terrains last year.
“I really want to improve on my eighth place in the Tour de France and show that I’m making progress in the Grand Tours,” Jorgenson said. “I see myself as an overall [classification] rider for the future. It’s a dream to take real steps in that direction.”
After the Tour, Vingegaard and Visma will still have another major objective on the docket as he targets the Vuelta a España, where he rode to second overall back in 2023 behind teammate Kuss. Kuss, for his part, is also expected to return to the Spanish Grand Tour.
All told, Visma will start nearly every Monument and Grand Tour with at least one rider, if not multiple riders, in contention to win. Of course, that is nothing particularly new for the team that swept all three Grand Tours in 2023. Even amid a string of disappointments, Visma was also the second-highest ranked team in cycling last year – but getting back on top will require their star-studded roster to convert all that potential into actual victories in the very biggest events in 2025.
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