How Jumbo-Visma became cycling’s dominant team

ON JULY 23RD, after more than 3,000km of cycling up hill and down dale, Jonas Vingegaard retained his Tour de France title. The Dane may have stood alone on the podium in Paris, but his victory was very much a team effort. Mr Vingegaard’s Dutch team, Jumbo-Visma, is ahead of any other in road racing.

Professional cycling teams consist of a stable of riders, a number of whom will be selected for any given race. The race squad will usually have a leader (Mr Vingegaard, in the case of Jumbo-Visma’s Tour de France campaign), who is attended on the road by several domestiques (“servants”). These riders play an often underrated role: towing star riders in their slipstream, fetching them food and water from the team car, and protecting them from the chaos of the peloton. Teams also contain non-riding staff who oversee everything from race strategy to nutrition to sleep management.

On all these fronts, Jumbo-Visma is excelling. Two months before Mr Vingegaard secured the yellow jersey in the Tour de France, his Slovenian team-mate, Primoz Roglic, won the Giro d’Italia’s pink one. Next month the pair will face off in the Vuelta a España, the third and last of the year’s “Grand Tours”, the sport’s most prestigious races. Should Jumbo-Visma win, it would become the first team to ever hold all three titles simultaneously. How has it become so strong?

As in all sports, money helps, although the amounts involved in cycling are much less than in, say, football. Some team sponsors have deeper pockets than others. Jumbo is a Dutch supermarket chain; Visma is a Norwegian software company. Their financial support enables the team not only to retain stars such as Mr Vingegaard and Mr Roglic, but also to sign high-quality domestiques such as Wout van Aert, a Belgian who has won nine stages of the Tour de France.

Jumbo-Visma is not the only team with money. The only man able to mount a serious challenge to Mr Vingegaard this year was Tadej Pogacar, the Slovenian winner of the Tour in 2020 and 2021. His team, UAE Team Emirates, is bankrolled by the United Arab Emirates. Bahrain Victorious, fourth in the team standings this year, enjoys similar state support from Bahrain.

Jumbo-Visma, however, combines money with good management. That involves devising smart race strategies, but also detailed prescriptions on preparation. Rohan Dennis, an Australian cyclist who joined Jumbo-Visma last year, has said that the team’s approach to nutrition, training and equipment is “so dialled to the point where if you’re not performing it’s your fault.”

Meticulousness is not unique to Jumbo-Vista. In cycling it was the hallmark of Sir Dave Brailsford, the principal of the INEOS Grenadiers team, formerly Team Sky, which dominated cycling during much of the past decade. For a long time Sir Dave has promoted the idea that multiple tiny gains can make big differences to overall performance. (That even extended to transporting the mattresses and duvets of his riders between the stages of a race to improve the quality of their sleep.)

Yet despite this fastidiousness INEOS Grenadiers have struggled in recent years. Some of that is down to luck, which remains a big factor in the sport. In 2019, for instance, INEOS’s British star, Chris Froome, a four-time winner of the Tour de France, crashed after he blew his nose during a practice event. Mr Froome struggled to recover from his injuries and left the team the following year.

Egan Bernal, the Colombian lined up as his long-term successor, filled the void almost immediately by winning the Tour in 2019. But last year he crashed into a bus during a training ride, breaking almost 20 bones and causing both lungs to collapse. Mr Bernal has not been the same since, though still managed an impressive 36th-place finish in this Tour.

Jumbo-Visma’s main riders have escaped such accidents. But perhaps the team’s greatest bit of luck comes in the shape of Mr Vingegaard. It showed good judgment when giving the Dane his first professional contract in 2019 when he was a promising youngster. But it is fortunate that he has developed into such an extraordinary performer.

Some teams trying to stop Jumbo-Visma are now searching for their own Mr Vingegaard. INEOS Grenadiers are believed to be looking to sign Remco Evenepoel, a 23-year-old Belgian who won the Vuelta last year. Many believe him capable of challenging the Vingegaard-Pogacar hegemony.

Mr Evenepoel’s hopes of retaining the Vuelta next month will be boosted by the expected absence of Mr Pogacar. But he will be worried by Mr Vingegaard’s plans to begin preparations for the event within a week of his Tour de France victory. Those concerns will be reinforced by the strengths of the back-up attack, Mr Roglic. If challengers tire themselves chasing down one Jumbo-Visma star, the other could benefit. The Dutch team appears determined to complete the first ever sweep of the grand tours. Its juggernaut is rolling on.■