Visma-Lease a Bike 2024 Season Preview—Can the Superteam Continue to Reign Supreme?
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Visma-Lease a Bike (known since 2019 as Jumbo-Visma until the start of the season) opened its 2024 account earlier this month when Dutch sprinter Olav Kooij won the Clasica de Almeria in Spain on February 11.
Launched to the finish line with a fabulous lead-out from Belgium’s Wout van Aert, Kooij started his celebration a bit too early perhaps—but the 22-year-old had done enough to secure the first win of the season for himself and his team.
Van Aert added to the team’s early tally five days later, winning Stage 3 of five stages in Volta ao Algarve in Portugal, the only stage race he’ll complete during the first racing phase of his season.
These were victories that will be forgotten after van Aert and the rest of the team’s talented Classics squad head to Belgium for the Classics in mid-February, starting with Omloop Het Nieuwsblad, the opening race of the Belgian calendar and the event considered by most pundits and aficionados to mark the “real” start to the season.
So before the rubber meets the cobbles, it’s a good time to take a look at the Dutch super team’s prospects heading into the 2024 season (on the men’s side at least) and the riders expected to create (or play a hand in creating) most of the headlines for the team this year.
But first, a look back at 2023
The 2023 season was a record-breaking one for Jumbo-Visma’s men’s team. The Dutch squad became the first in the sport’s history to win all three grand tours in a single season with Slovenia's Primož Roglič winning his first Giro d’Italia, Denmark’s Jonas Vingegaard defending his title at the Tour de France, and American Sepp Kuss taking a surprise victory at the Vuelta a España, with Vingegaard and Roglič joining him on the final podium. It was the first time one team had swept all three podium spots in a single grand tour. It sounds like a dream season—and in many ways it was.
But there were some hiccups as well. First, van Aert failed to win either the Tour of Flanders or Paris-Roubaix—again—continuing a losing streak in the cobbled Monuments that just adds to the already immense amounts of pressure on the Belgian superstar.
Then, the team’s previous title sponsor, Jumbo, announced in the middle of the season it was pulling out of the sport, leaving one of pro cycling’s biggest (and most expensive) teams looking for a new backer.
Making things even more awkward, after the Tour de France there were talks of possible merger with Belgium’s Soudal-Quick Step, a move that would have left several riders and staff looking for new jobs while creating a super-team unlike any the sport has ever seen. Everyone was concerned about what such a merger would have meant for the sport, but luckily it never came to pass after Visma stepped-up to fill Jumbo’s place and Lease a Bike came in to cover Visma’s. (Cycling sponsorship often works a lot like a big game of financial Tetris.)
Then there was the Vuelta, which on paper looked like a resounding success, but almost didn’t turn out that way after Vingegaard and Roglič (seemingly in conflict with each other) couldn’t get their acts together to help Kuss defend his lead in the Spanish grand tour. A few weeks after the race was over, we learned that Roglič was leaving the team for BORA-hansgrohe. A coincidence? We don’t think so.
And the drama continued well into the off-season. In December Richard Plugge, the team’s managing director, dropped a bombshell by announcing that Belgium’s Cian Uijtdebroeks–considered by many to be a future grand tour contender—was joining the team from BORA-hansgrohe. BORA promptly denied the rumors–which Uijtdebroeks’s agent disputed—and after a few more days of negotiations (which drew the ire of some of the sport’s other team managers) and a lot more money (we assume), the transfer was completed.
What about 2024?
Well, the team’s wish list likely goes something like this:
Win a third Tour de France (preferably with Vingegaard)
Win the Tour of Flanders and/or Paris-Roubaix (preferably with van Aert)
Win as much as possible along the way.
Simple, right?
Well, if you’re Visma–Lease a Bike, the answer is a resounding, “Sorta?” Winning races such as the Tour de France and Paris-Roubaix is never easy, but when you’ve assembled a roster like Visma–Lease a Bike has, it’s easy to see why they fancy their chances in just about any race on the calendar.
Who’s the Man of the Hour?
When you’ve won the last two Tours de France—and both times done so by defeating a legendary talent like Slovenia’s Tadej Pogačar (UAE Team Emirates)—you’re clearly your team’s marquee rider. That’s the case with Vingegaard, who crushed Pog at the beginning of the third week to win his second consecutive Tour and then almost won the Vuelta a Espana (albeit at the expense of Kuss, his teammate).
Heading into 2024, Visma’s taking the “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” approach to the 27-year-old’s program, starting with the Gran Camino at the end of February, which he won last year. Then he’ll race Tirreno-Adriatico in March, the Tour of the Basque Country in April, and the Critérium du Dauphiné in early June. In between he’ll spend lots and lots of time at high-altitude training camps.
And the biggest test of Vingegaard’s career will come at this year’s Tour de France, where he’ll face a familiar foe in Pogačar, a new foe (Tour-wise) in Belgium’s Remco Evenepoel (Soudal–Quick Step), and a formerly-unofficial-but-now-official foe in Roglič, who was essentially forced to leave the team to have any chance of winning a Tour de France of his own. If he’s able to win a third Tour against this level of competition, we might have to call the Dane the best pure grand tour rider of his generation.
Is anyone on the Hot Seat?
Let’s be clear: Wout van Aert is not on the hot seat at Visma-Lease a Bike. He’s without a doubt one of the five most talented riders in the sport and just about every single team in the peloton would be doing backflips to sign him away if they had the money and the chance.
But van Aert has failed to deliver in the races he[[EMDASH]]and Visma[[EMDASH]]covet the most: the Tour of Flanders or Paris-Roubaix. It’s not entirely his fault: in 2022 he was in the form of his life but tested positive for COVID-19 a few days before Flanders. He returned in time for Roubaix, but was clearly a bit undertrained. Yet still finished second.
Last year he was again among the top pre[[no hyphen-]]race favorites heading into Flanders, but he banged his knee in an early crash and just didn’t have the legs to follow attacks in the finale. He was better at Roubaix, but flatted while attacking on the Carrefour de l’Arbe with about 17K left to race. He had a decent gap at the time, and we can’t help but wonder if anyone would have caught him had he not punctured.
But while it’s not entirely his fault, great riders find a way to either overcome bad luck or manufacture good luck of their own. And that’s where van Aert seems to come up short[[EMDASH]]especially against guys like the Netherland’s Mathieu van der Poel (Alpecin-Deceuninck) and Pogačar.
Van der Poel is without a doubt van Aert’s biggest nemesis: the Dutchman already lives in Belgium to avoid paying Dutch income tax and it appears he lives rent-free in van Aert’s head as well. A win for van Aert in either cobbled Monument would flip the script for the Belgian. But until that happens, he will always face immense pressure from the Belgian press, the Belgian fanbase, and himself.
That’s a lot of star power. Does the team have any unsung heroes?
Like van Aert, Tiesj Benoot knows a thing or two about pressure from the Belgian press. The 29-year-old finished fifth at his first Tour of Flanders in 2015[[EMDASH]]at just 21 years of age[[EMDASH]]and was immediately anointed as the nation’s next Tom Boonen. (Belgians love crushing the careers of young riders by calling them the “next fill-in-the-blank-with-a-Belgian-legend.”)
Aside from winning Strade Bianche in 2018, wins were few and far between for Benoot, who spent a couple lackluster seasons at Team Sunweb/DSM before being wisely scooped up by Jumbo-Visma[[EMDASH]]who turned him into an elite jack-of-all trades, a “domestique deluxe” who can handle himself on the cobbles, in the Ardennes, and in the Tour de France.
Strong and selfless, the Belgian has finally tapped into a steady stream of the talent that peaked through earlier in his career, and he’s happy to use it for the sake of Vingegaard and van Aert.
Who’s the team’s best new rider heading into 2024?
Always on the look-out for the next big thing (cough–Uijtdebroeks—cough), Visma has already found its next Benoot in American Matteo Jorgenson. Like Benoot, the 24-year-old seems at home on all sorts of terrain, having already excelled on the cobbles and at the Tour de France while riding for Movistar the past four seasons.
Big and strong, he’s the perfect type of rider for a team like Visma, and he should slot in right away alongside van Aert in the cobbled Classics and Vingegaard at the Tour.
And we suspect Visma views him as more than just a future super-domestique. Like most riders do after joining the team, he’ll improve drastically with the support of the team’s coaches and physiologists. So there’s no telling where his ceiling really is.
Who’s the team’s biggest departure?
It must have been hard for the team to say goodbye to Roglič—who won three Vueltas, a Giro d’Italia, and scores of other races for the team since joining it in 2016. The Slovenian was largely responsible for ushering in the team’s transformation from being a really good team to being a true super-team and almost won the squad its first Tour de France in 2020. So it’s easy to understand why the team graciously cooperated in facilitating his departure from the team in exchange for another chance to try and win the Tour de France.
But it was also a selfish move, a true case of addition by subtraction. Just ask Kuss, who almost watched his chance to win last year’s Vuelta go up the road while Roglič refused to accept the fact that his chance of winning a fourth Tour of Spain disappeared when the team sent Kuss up the road in a breakaway during the first week.
So while the team will miss the WorldTour points that Roglič earned each season (sorta), they won’t miss having to reconcile the ambitions of two (or more) riders who can justifiably lay claim to the team’s captaincy in grand tours.
Who’s the team’s best up-and-comer or rookie?
Norway’s Johannes Staune-Mittet is one of the hottest young talents in the sport, a rider who’s already won two of the world’s three most prestigious stage races for Under-23 riders—the Ronde de l'Isard and the Giro Next Gen—and finished second in the third—Tour de l’Avenir, which is like a mini-Tour de France for riders under 23-years-old.
There should be no pressure on Staune-Mittet during his first full season with Visma-Lease a Bike’s WorldTour squad (he raced with their development team from 2021 through 2023). But if all goes as planned, he’ll be ready (alongside guys like Uijtdebroeks and possibly Jorgenson) to lead the team himself in the future. In the meantime, we expect him to win a race or three when given the chance—especially in minor stage races that the team has to send a team to while the squad’s heavy hitters are at training camps.
What about Sepp Kuss?
Well, his Vuelta a España win last fall was certainly no fluke, but it does complicate things for the American and his team. We were hoping he’d get a chance to race the Giro d’Italia, where he could have had the team all to himself. But the team clearly wants him at his best for the Tour de France, where he’ll be a valuable lieutenant (and Plan B) alongside Vingegaard.
But while Kuss has refused to downplay his chances of possibly winning another grand tour—as he shouldn’t—we just don’t see it happening. Last year’s victory—while not a fluke—was indeed a surprise. And we doubt that other teams would have let him gain so much time during the Vuelta’s first week had they known he would still be in contention by the third. In other words, it’s one thing to win a race when no one’s expecting you to, it’s another thing entirely to win one when everyone is.
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