The sudden retirement of Simon Yates shook the cycling world. After all, the 33-year-old just reached a high point in his career, winning the sought-after Giro d’Italia. For Visma | Lease a Bike, this is a low blow, however it’s not a first instance of such occuring, as Tom Dumoulin in past, and also Fem van Empel more recently left the world of cycling in a similar fashion.Has the pressure from teams on riders become too much at times, or is this just an individual case? In de Leiderstrui asked Milan Vader, a former Visma rider (2022-2024). “I thought cycling was changing in general anyway. It’s all getting more serious and it’s going a step further each time.”
The 29-year-old sees a major difference in training demands. “Where you used to just train well… with good training and a bit of rest, you’d be fine. Now it demands much more of you off the bike, too. But that’s the case with every team, and you have to keep up and accept that.”
“You might even have to like it a little bit,” Vader suggests. “What I think is most important, in any case, is that the team understands it. That they say: gosh, we know we’re asking a lot right now, but do you see any way to accommodate that? Then the athlete is always the one who has to say yes, of course.”
Q36.5 “keeping it real”
Vader gets that feeling very strongly with his current team, Pinarello-Q36.5 Pro Cycling. “If they’re going about it that way… it’s really nice. They always keep an eye on the home situation. They also know that if you’re on the bike twice a day, it takes a little more time. Some have children and things like that, and they all take that into account.”
The Dutchman is quite pleased with his team’s approach. “We want to go very far, but only as far as we can. I think you see that with many teams in cycling; they simply have a vision or a goal. They think: this is going to happen, no matter the cost. And if you cross the line and don’t perform anymore, that’s a shame.”
Simon Yates won’t return to the cycling peloton in 2026