(Paris) The Jumbo-Visma team, which dominates world cycling, will be called Visma-Lease a Bike next season, the specialist site Wielerflits reported on Monday.
The name change follows the withdrawal of the Dutch team’s main sponsor, the Dutch supermarket chain Jumbo, whose new management has changed its marketing strategy.
Its future sponsor, Lease a Bike, is a Belgian subsidiary of the Pon group which offers companies the rental of fleets of bicycles available to their employees. The company operates in particular in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany.
The Jumbo-Visma is coming off an extraordinary 2023 season, which saw it win all three grand tours (Giro with the Slovenian Primoz Roglic, Tour de France with the Dane Jonas Vingegaard and Vuelta with the American Sepp Kuss).
In Spain, the “Hornets” even signed an unprecedented hat-trick, Kuss ahead of Vingegaard and Roglic.
The team led by Richard Plugge, which will lose Roglic next season – the Slovenian has joined Bora – also has in its ranks the Belgian champion Wout Van Aert and the French Christophe Laporte or the Dutch Marianne Vos.
Behind Slovenian Tadej Pogacar (UAE), three of his riders are in the top 5 of the UCI world rankings (Vingegaard is 2nd, Roglic 3rd and Van Aert 5th).
The doubts that arose about the future of its partnership with Jumbo fueled reflections this fall on a possible merger of the team with Soudal Quick-Step, another stronghold of cycling, putting the peloton under pressure before this solution was possible. abandoned.
Lease a Bike was already a secondary sponsor of the Jumbo-Visma since the beginning of the year.
If the agreement is confirmed, it will end the search for a new main sponsor. An investment (to the tune of 15 million euros) from the American platform Amazon had been mentioned for a while, but ultimately did not materialize, the Dutch daily Algemeen Dagblad wrote at the beginning of the month.
