2024 Emerging Trend Breakdown: UAE & Bora Clearly Plan to Take the Fight to Jonas Vingegaard & Visma at the Tour de France
How the recent trend of Jonas Vingegaard & Visma's rival teams stacking their 2024 Tour de France rosters with their top GC talent could alter the balance of power in July
As pro cycling eases into the rapidly-approaching 2024 season with pre-season training camps and, at least in my opinion, much-too-early Tour de France team reveals (via the release of the 2024 racing schedules for their major stars), an interesting trend has emerged that differs significantly from year’s past: The major GC contending teams are all putting together Tour de France superteams in an attempt to take on the Jonas Vingegaard/Visma-Lease a Bike juggernaut.
For example, the Bora-Hansgrohe and UAE teams of the two biggest GC challengers (Primož Roglič and Tadej Pogačar) to the two-time defending champion Jonas Vingegaard, have all announced they are sending teams stacked with all of their top GC contenders in an attempt to combat Vingegaard and Visma with a dose of their own medicine.
And, perhaps most interestingly, instead of the traditional ‘we will let the road decide’ mantra we’ve seen from multi-leader teams in years past, Bora has already come out and explicitly stated that their talented team will be fully behind Roglič from the start of the race and UAE has implicitly signaled their stacked team will be solely behind Pogačar due to the simple fact that Pogačar is the sole team leader, without question, at any race he participates in (a small perk of being one of the best riders of all-time in the prime of their career).
This trend runs counter to the conventional wisdom of years past, which stated that teams should spread their best talent out across the three Grand Tours in order to maximize their chances of success.
The perceived safer route would be for Bora to send solid GC riders like Aleksandr Vlasov to the Giro d’Italia, instead of committing him to ride in support of Roglič at the Tour de France.
But, while holding talented riders back and sending them to target other Grand Tours is an intriguing idea and is something that ‘feels’ like it should work, the return on the strategy has significantly decreased in recent years.
For example, in the last three editions, the Giro has been won twice by riders who were near the top of the GC food chain at the time of their win (Egan Bernal 2021 & Primož Roglič 2023) out of the last.
Meanwhile, four out of the last five Vuelta a España’s have been won by Primož Roglič and Remco Evenepoel, with the fifth winner, Sepp Kuss, winning due to having two of the best riders, Vingegaard and Roglič, on his team.
Going into 2024, the Giro overall classification will be contested by top-tier riders like Pogačar, and potentially even Wout van Aert, while the Vuelta, as has become the norm in recent years, will almost certainly continue to feature the world’s best GC riders.
In summation, the non-Tour de France Grand Tours are no longer the low-hanging fruit they once were, so the incentive to hold your top GC riders out of the Tour to target them has all but disappeared.
Another reason we are seeing this is that teams realize that the only way to beat modern Super Contenders like Jonas Vingegaard and Super Teams like Visma-Lease a Bike is to throw everything at them and attempt to sow chaos (much like Jumbo did to overthrow the seemingly unbeatable Tadej Pogačar at the 2022 Tour de France).
How This Strategy Could Swing the Balance of Power at the 2024 Tour de France
Outside of the simple fact that this will (hopefully) produce the most interesting GC battle at the Tour de France, it contradicts Vingegaard’s Visma team’s 2024 Grand Tour strategy, which is seeing them stretch their team thin across the Grand Tours.
Ironically, Visma is the team that has used the ‘stacked-team, swarm-attack’ strategy with the most success in recent years when they implemented it to win the 2022 Tour de France and 2023 Vuelta a Espaňa.
We should note that this is partly by design since, as the team of the odds-on favorite to win in 2024 (Vingegaard), they have somewhat lost the ability to run this strategy back since their best chance of winning requires them to fall into a defensive/control mode from the very beginning of the race, since they have the most to lose by racing aggressively.
This means the risk/reward ratio doesn’t align for them to bring multiple leaders, but instead, it incentivizes them to bring extremely strong domestiques who can set such a hard race that they can control attacks from their rivals.
As a reference, when we look at the recently-released full start lists from UAE, Visma, and Bora-Hansgrohe for the 2024 Tour de France (as well as Ineos’ partial start list), we can see that UAE, Bora, and even Ineos have more potential GC contenders* on their Tour teams than Visma.
It goes without saying that we should keep in mind that these start lists can and will change due to rider injury and form issues once the season actually gets underway.
*This was calculated by tracking the top Grand Tour GC results within the three years prior to that Tour for each team’s riders and, through an admittedly objective process, by tagging a rider as an ‘Actual’ or ‘Best-Case’ GC contender.
2024 Tour de France Select Team GC Contender Rankings
1) UAE
Tadej Pogačar (2xTdF Wins)
Adam Yates (1xTdF podium)
João Almeida (1x Giro podium)
Juan Auyso (1xVuelta podium)
Pavel Sivakov (1xGiro top ten)
Marc Soler
Nils Politt
Tim Wellens
Totals: 4xActual GC Contenders
5xBest-Case GC Contenders
2) Bora-Hansgrohe
Primož Roglič (4xGT wins)
Jai Hindley (1xGiro win)
Aleksandr Vlasov (2xGT top five)
Daniel Martínez (1xGiro top five)
Lennard Kämna (1xGiro top ten)
Matteo Sobrero
Nico Denz
Danny van Poppel
Totals: 2xActual GC Contenders
5xBest-Case GC Contenders
3) Ineos
Geraint Thomas (2xGT podium)
Carlos Rodríguez (1xTdF top five)
Tom Pidcock (2xTdF top 20)
2xActual GC Contenders
3xBest-Case GC Contenders
4) Visma-Lease a Bike
Jonas Vingegaard (2xTdF wins)
Sepp Kuss (1xVuelta win)
Steven Kruijswijk
Jan Tratnik
Dylan van Baarle
Christophe Laporte
Matteo Jorgenson
Tiesj Benoot
Totals: 2xActual GC Contenders
2xBest-Case GC Contenders
2023 Tour de France Select Team GC Contender Rankings
When we compare this to the 2023 Tour de France, we can immediately see that while Visma’s (formerly Jumbo-Visma) team strength (as judged by the raw number of ‘Best-Case GC Contenders’) is roughly the same as 2024, Bora and UAE have significantly increased their GC contender depth between the 2023 and 2024 edition of the Tour.
1) Visma (Jumbo-Visma)
Jonas Vingegaard (1xTdF win)
Wilco Kelderman (1xGiro podium)
Sepp Kuss (1xVuelta top ten)
Tiesj Benoot
Christophe Laporte
Wout van Aert
Dylan van Baarle
Nathan van Hooydonck
Total: 1xActual GC Contenders
3xBest-Case GC Contenders
2) UAE
Tadej Pogačar (2xTdF wins)
Adam Yates (2xGT top five)
Marc Soler
Rafał Majka
Mikkel Bjerg
Felix Großschartner
Vegard Stake Laengen
Matteo Trentin
Total: 2xActualGC Contenders
2xBest-Case GC Contenders
3) Bora-Hansgrohe
Jai Hindley (1xGiro win)
Emanuel Buchmann (1xGiro top ten)
Patrick Konrad
Marco Haller
Bob Jungels
Jordi Meeus
Nils Politt
Danny van Poppel
Total: 1xActual GC Contenders
2xBest-Case GC Contenders
2022 Tour de France Select Team GC Contender Rankings
When we go back and look at teams of the top three riders in the 2022 Tour, we can see just how much Visma (formerly Jumbo-Visma) has drifted from their multi-prong leader strategy that they executed so well on Stage 11 of that race to dismantle Tadej Pogačar’s UAE team support and, ultimately, cracked Pogačar on the final climb.
1) Visma (Jumbo-Visma)
Primož Primož (3xVuelta win)
Jonas Vingegaard (1xTdF podium)
Steven Kruijswijk (1xTdF podium)
Sepp Kuss (1xVuelta top ten)
Wout Van Aert
Tiesj Benoot
Christophe Laporte
Nathan van Hooydonck
Total: 2xActual GC Contenders
4xBest-Case GC Contenders
2) UAE
Tadej Pogačar (2xTdF win)
Rafał Majka (2xGT top ten)
George Bennett (2xGT top ten)
Marc Soler (1xVuelta top ten)
Brandon McNulty
Mikkel Bjerg
Vegard Stake Laengen
Marc Hirschi
Total: 1xActual GC Contenders
4xBest-Case GC Contenders
3) Ineos
Geraint Thomas (1xTdF win)
Daniel Martínez (1xGiro top five)
Adam Yates (2xGT top five)
Jonathan Castroviejo
Filippo Ganna
Tom Pidcock
Luke Rowe
Dylan van Baarle
Total: 2xActual GC Contenders
3xBest-Case GC Contenders
The above data makes it clear that Vingegaard and Visma’s Tour de France GC rivals have clearly made significant adjustments in an effort to put up the best fight they possibly can with the rosters they have.
These deep rosters, just as we saw at the recent Vuelta, give teams multiple ways to squeeze the team of the pre-race favorite.
In particular, sending a second-favorite into the early breakaway, just as Jumbo did on Stage 6 of the 2023 Vuelta and Bora did on Stage 5 of the 2023 Tour de France, can add significant stress and increase the physical workload for the team of the race leader/favorite.
While it isn’t clear if this ‘full chaos’ will actually work, and does come with a significant amount of risk since it means UAE and Bora are pooling valuable resources at a single race, it is promising to see teams pivoting quickly to face the formidable threat of Jonas Vingegaard’s Tour de France year-over-year dominance.
Thanks for comparing the data on a year-over-year basis. Great to see that UAE and Bora are putting significant resources into challenging Jumbo. Victory is just not as enjoyable when it comes without a serious contest. Let's not forget the Nice TT to end the Tour. Dramatic storylines could emerge.