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Visma | Lease a Bike and Ineos Grenadiers have stopped radio transmission during the Tour de France after stage 17

Theo

After the seventeenth stage of the Tour de France, both Visma | Lease a Bike and Ineos Grenadiers appear to have cancelled their radio transmission agreement with race organiser ASO with immediate effect.

Only three days left until the 2024 race, but the cables have already been cut. “From yesterday we suspended it until after the Tour,” Jasper Saeijs, marketing manager at Visma | Lease a Bike, told CyclingWeekly. “We have discussed a lot about strategies that are communicated, about what influences the race and what doesn’t, and we think we need to clarify that better, then we can look to the future.”


A three-person team receives audio from the 15 participating teams and decides what to broadcast on TV with a 15- to 30-minute delay. Saeijs said there was no specific incident in the last week that forced the team to make its decision, but “every day counted and we decided to just suspend the tour and observe whether or not it is possible to continue and also how we can continue.”

He added: “We don’t actually have a problem with ASO, but we see things differently. We can’t trust the process for the coming stages to make a good decision about what is strategy and what will or won’t affect the race. We are still for anything that can involve the fans in the sport… we are really for fan involvement… but it must not affect the race and the race strategy, and in our opinion it has done that too much.”

“We are not the only team, there are more teams that don’t like the way things are going.” Several sources confirmed to CyclingWeekly that Ineos Grenadiers have also revoked access, although there is no official confirmation. In addition, several teams expressed disappointment over the €5,000 they will receive for handing over access to their team radios, but Visma insists that financial compensation was not part of their decision.

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