Maybe we could set AI Wiggo on Big Jim? Just spitballing here.
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Jim Ratcliffe’s hypocritical, xenophobic rhetoric has dominated the cycling-adjacent news in the latter half of this week. Our overriding emotion is one of exasperation and sadness. Things like shorts-gate, a tongue-in-cheek bit made funnier by the absence of any sense of humour from Ineos Grenadiers on the subject, become less funny when the influential billionaire bankrolling it all is confirmed (as suspected) to be Officially Not A Good Guy.
Elsewhere, it’s Visma’s turn for some superteam drama, and if you are the sort of person who’d like to pay £5 a month to be trained by an AI version of Bradley Wiggins, we’d love to hear from you.
Jonas Vingegaard’s coach Tim Heemskerk announced this week that he would be leaving Visma-Lease a Bike after eight years because “there wasn’t enough room for creativity and passion in my daily work.”
“After eight wonderful years with our team, I have decided, with a heavy heart, to step down as a trainer and coach,” Heemskerk wrote on Instagram. “The last two or three months, there wasn’t enough room for creativity and passion in my daily work. That’s precisely why it’s now time to step down.”
That’s quite the admission. Maybe we can put it down to Dutch directness, but also the usual way things go is you don’t really say much of the real reason you’re leaving on your way out the door.
Heemskerk isn’t the only one to have disliked this rigidity, with both Attila Valter and Cian Uijtdebroeks departing Visma-Lease a Bike last year due to the team lacking “the room for individualism” and also citing the departure of sporting director Merijn Zeeman in 2023 after they won all three Grand Tours and the pressure to follow that achievement.
“We gave it our all, but the harder we tried, the more we risked burning out under the pressure and stress. At least I, and certainly other riders at Visma, felt this sensation. It’s not that they didn’t listen to us. They did, but they didn’t want to change things,” Valter recently told CyclingNews.
Wout van Aert soon stepped up to defend his team (that’s the sort of loyalty you get from a lifetime contract, presumably), telling the Live Slow Ride Fast podcast:
“I think it’s a shame that the situation is being generalised, when it’s completely unfair to do so. I really consider Visma-Lease a Bike my team. I know how things work here and it’s not an inhuman environment at all. It is not a toxic team.
“I think there is plenty of room to discuss how you feel and if you need a different approach. But it’s true, cycling remains cycling. It’s a very tough sport that requires a lot of sacrifices. And these sacrifices are perhaps even greater today, in the data age in which we live. Everything is constantly measured. You must continuously report how you train, how you sleep and where you are. There is no more room for improvisation. It seems perfectly logical to me that more and more people are discouraged by it.”
The disruption to Vingegaard’s training should be minimal; he’s a seasoned pro after all. Moreover, it’ll be Mathieu Heijboer, the Head of Performance at Visma and also Wout van Aert’s coach, who’ll be overseeing the Dane. But the question lingers: was this all a bit of a storm in a teacup or a hint at deeper troubles within the Dutch formation?
Ending on a Cliffe-clanger 🙄
One of the bigger cycling-adjacent stories of the week was Ineos Grenadiers’ owner Jim Ratcliffe telling Sky News: “The UK has been colonised by immigrants,” before reeling out a bunch of false, easily Googleable facts about the UK’s population.
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said Ratcliffe’s remarks were “offensive and wrong” and the petrochemicals billionaire drew criticism from both Piers Morgan and Novara Media’s Ash Sakar, and if you can get those two to agree on anything you know that you’ve really fucked it.
The hypocrisy and falseness of Ratcliffe’s comments has been well-discussed already (although we haven’t seen anyone pick up on the fact Ratcliffe is the largest private landowner in Iceland, a country he is very much not from) so instead we’re going to bring you an anecdote that maybe speaks to how and why he can give an interview such as the one he did to Sky News in the first place.
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