Promotional feature in association with Rouvy
Visma-Lease a Bike have been at the forefront of innovation and marginal gains in cycling in recent years, developments that have enabled the Dutch team to win multiple Grand Tours.
Whether it’s been the team’s pioneering FoodCoach app, their aero helmets or even their use of ice socks and vests to deal with hot conditions, the team of two-time Tour de France winner Jonas Vingegaard and Wout van Aert has consistently been ahead of the curve.
And now they have identified the latest technology that they believe can help them to maintain their position at the top of the sport: Rouvy, the indoor cycling app that allows riders to ride real world routes from the comfort of their own home.
With over 1,500 routes from across the world to choose from, including famous mountain passes such as Alpe d’Huez and Mont Ventoux, Rouvy is the most immersive of all indoor riding experiences, broadcasting camera footage from the roadside into the homes of riders.
For champions like Vingegaard, who spends most of the year in his home nation of Denmark – a country that has its fair share of wet and cold winter weather – Rouvy allows him to prepare for his biggest of summer challenges even when snow blocks physical passage in the Alps and Pyrenees.
“Being able to train on Rouvy’s real routes allows me to recon and practise on race routes I’d otherwise not be able to access due to weather or travel,” Vingegaard said. “It’s invaluable for ensuring I’m prepared, no matter where I am.”
The brains behind Visma’s innovation is its head of performance, Mathieu Heijboer. He too is enthused by the partnership with Rouvy – pointing the platform out as another key tool in their weaponry.
“With Rouvy we can build and simulate precise routes for training or race recons,” he said, highlighting how external users can also record routes themselves and then upload them to Rouvy for other users to ride. “This enables us to prepare our riders under real-world conditions while taking into account the challenges of specific terrains – even from thousands of miles away.”
The link-up between Rouvy and Visma is not just a one-way partnership: from January 2025, the team will launch a virtual Visma-Lease a Bike training camp where other users can follow the team’s winter preparation with specific workouts and training plans devised by their experts, while also making available virtual assets like jerseys and bikes.
That means that amateurs training for their own racing goals or simply riding to get or maintain fitness will be able to access WorldTour-level training advice from some of the very best coaches and riders in the business. You wouldn’t get Lionel Messi training five-a-side footballers around the world, but now you can get younger and older cycling fanatics across the globe riding the same training programs as Vingegaard and Van Aert.
What’s more, riders can choose whichever workout they want and then ride it in an array of locations: they could head to the finishing course of a Vuelta a España stage, tackle one of the Giro d’Italia’s mythical climbs, or even visit an exotic location in Japan, Taiwan or Namibia. With Rouvy, not only is the outdoor riding experience brought indoors, but the entire world is welcomed through the front door.
If it works for Vingegaard, it can work for all of us.
