Tiesj Benoot is the only Visma | Lease a Bike Tour de France rider not in Tignes – Belgian explains why

Jonas Vingegaard came up short against Tadej Pogacar in the French stage race, but he did so with a core part of the Tour de France squad already around him. Matteo Jorgenson, Sepp Kuss, and Victor Campenaerts are expected to be there in early July, but others, Wout van Aert, Simon Yates, Edoardo Affini (coming from the Giro), and Benoot (Tour of Switzerland), have taken different approaches to prepare.

Of course, the Belgian did follow the performances of his teammates. “I have two young kids at home, and they’re home from school around 3:30, but I still managed to catch some of it. It’s impressive how strong the guys are riding. The time trial was very encouraging from our perspective, although we obviously would have liked the final two stages to go differently. Then again, the Tour is still a ways off, we just need to stay focused on the process.”

“For me personally, I actually asked the team if I could ride the Tour of Switzerland this year,” Benoot explains. “For the past three years, I’ve done the same build-up: classics → Sierra Nevada → Dauphiné → Tignes → Tour. So I wanted to switch it up a bit. And in this case, I also get an extra week to prepare, since I usually keep racing through Liège.”

The reliable workhorse of the yellow-and-black squad didn’t spend three weeks, but four, at altitude in Sierra Nevada. Sounds extreme, right? Benoot adds some perspective: “I definitely wasn’t the only one who spent four weeks at altitude. Tijmen Graat did it too, and so did Otto Vergaerde and Jasper Stuyven, or close to it,” he said, referring to his Lidl-Trek colleagues.

While most of his teammates are heading back to altitude after the Dauphiné (or Giro), we won’t be see Benoot above 2,000 meters again. “As a result, I won’t be doing the altitude camp in Tignes. I had a really good training block in Sierra Nevada, and my family joined me for the fourth week, so it was great. After the Tour of Switzerland, I’ll be heading home instead of going back to altitude, to also race the Belgian National Championships.”  

Benoot explained the thinking behind this different approach: “I feel like it’s sometimes just good to add a new stimulus. And for me, that means changing things up this time. A bit of variation can be important over the course of a career, both physically and mentally.”  

“I’ve had six solid weeks of training now. And it may sound odd, but if you want to be in shape one week earlier, you have to start training one week earlier. Everything gets pushed closer together. The difference for me is also that I wrapped up with Liège, whereas others ended their spring with the Basque Country or Paris-Roubaix,” said the rider who consistently races the full spring classics season from Omloop to Liège.

Four weeks in the thin air instead of three, does that come with extra benefits? “I more or less did the same as in previous years, though with some different focus areas. When you stay longer, you can build up more gradually. In that fourth week, I trained a bit harder, because I know I won’t get another proper training block after the Tour of Switzerland. Normally, I’d still have that block after the Dauphiné.”

“I followed the same approach in 2019 and rode a pretty solid Tour that year,” says Benoot, who finished second in the Brioude stage behind Daryl Impey, riding for Lotto Soudal at the time.

The stakes were different back then, but in 2025 Benoot knows exactly what’s expected of him. “There was absolutely no pressure from the team this week in Switzerland. The Tour de France is what really matters. So it’s a luxury to race like this and fine-tune those final few percent,” says Benoot, whose Tour of Switzerland was somewhat disrupted by a crash on Friday.