Just a day after Cycling Weekly reported that at least six teams at the Tour de France were threatening to walk away from the deal that saw their team radios broadcast on TV during the race, Visma-Lease a Bike and Ineos Grenadiers have immediately suspended their arrangement with the race organisers, ASO.
Both Visma and Ineos refused access to their internal communication to ASO on stage 19 of the Tour, and will similarly not permit their team audios to be broadcast on television during stages 20 and 21.
Earlier in the race, Jasper Saeijs, marketing manager at Visma-Lease a Bike, told CW that the Dutch team were unhappy with a number of messages that were broadcast during the 2023 race, and indicated that the team of the defending champion, Jonas Vingegaard, would not sign up to the project in 2025, unless changes were made.
With just three days left to go of the 2024 race, however, they’ve already cut the cables. “From yesterday we suspended it until after the Tour,” Saeijs said at the start of stage 20 in Nice. “We had a lot of discussions about strategies being communicated, what is affecting the race and not, and we think we need to sort that out better, then we can look to the future.” CW understands that Visma informed ASO of their decision after stage 17.
A team of three people receive audios from the 15 participating teams and decide what should be broadcast on TV, with a delay of between 15 and 30 minutes. Saeijs said there wasn’t any specific incident in the last week that had forced the team to make their decision, but that “it was counting up every day, and we decided to just suspend and look after the Tour to see if it’s possible or not to continue, and also the way to continue.
He added: “We don’t really have a problem [with ASO] but we look at things differently. One thing is we can’t trust the process for the upcoming stages that they can make a good decision on what is strategy and what is affecting the race or not. That’s why we said, ‘let us suspend for now’, and we’ll look after the Tour de France to see how we can do this better.
“We are still in favour of everything that can engage fans in the sport… we are really pro fan engagement… but it can’t affect the race and the race strategy, and in our opinion it did this too much. We are not the only team, there are more teams that don’t really like how it is going.”
Half-a-dozen teams expressed their disappointment to CW about the €5,000 they are given for handing over access to their team radios, but Visma insist that the financial remuneration was not a part of their decision.
Several sources confirmed to CW that Ineos Grenadiers have also revoked access, although a spokesperson for the British team declined to comment.
Before the start of stage 20, two other teams told CW of their dissatisfaction over team tactics apparently being aired on TV, but they both said that they would remain committed until the end of the race
