Visma | Lease a Bike praises van Aert, and thinks they saw 'something' in Pogacar: "We can work with that"

Van Aert dropped Pogacar on the beautiful cobbled climb through Montmartre and rode solo to victory on the Champs-Elysées. It was the only time Pogacar cracked in this Tour. 'We could have ended the race even better with a yellow jersey, of course, but this is really fantastic. The way Wout did it again... He was ready for it, of course, and really wanted to win here, so we're ending the Tour in a very nice way. That's fantastic," Plugge told NOS.

The director of Visma | Lease a Bike observed that Van Aert not only responded to Pogacar's acceleration, but he could also go faster. “And how! This is a climb that suits Wout, and Pogacar went hard the first two times. Wout didn't budge, so I knew he would be there on the third attempt. Then it would have been the two of them, but the fact that he pushed out a sprint and crossed the line solo is absolutely perfect. Fantastic!”

“I'm very happy at the moment,” said Plugge, who was nevertheless honest: "Of course, we came here for yellow, and it would have been even better if we had ended up with yellow. However, given the competition, we must be content with second place. We gave it our all, and I think the crowd enjoyed it. We stuck to our plan until the very end to see if we could find a moment when it was possible. We failed."

And yet Plugge and the Visma | Lease a Bike staff think they have seen something that will help the team build on this over the next twelve months. “We observed aspects of our performance, as well as Pogacar's within the team, that we believe we can utilize. We can use this as a foundation to build upon and make another attempt at the yellow jersey next year. Today, we demonstrated that it is indeed possible to beat him, and we must hold onto that,” he said, referring to Van Aert's victory.

However, it will take more than just Montmartre to get Vingegaard to win. "We're going to figure out how to do that, and we already have some ideas. “We do have some starting points to work with for next year. We'll look at that again. I'm not disappointed that Jonas didn't succeed, because we really tried to shake Pogacar off. We were also the only ones who tried, but it is what it is.”