Simon Yates broke his contract with Visma-Lease a Bike to abruptly exit the sport, and was the third star rider to leave the team suddenly mid-contract (Photo: Billy Ceusters)

Richard Plugge, the team boss at World Tour squad Visma-Lease a Bike, said the team had no option but to accept the sudden retirement of Simon Yates, which came at a time of year when he is impossible to replace with someone else of the same calibre.

Yates, who two weeks ago announced his decision to retire, breaking his contract a year early, is the third high profile rider with Visma Lease a Bike to bring their careers to an early and unexpected halt.

The British rider issued a statement about leaving the sport but didn’t really explain his reasons. His former Visma-Lease a Bike team mate, Paris Roubaix winner Dylan van Baarle, has since said both he and Yates had issues with the way the Dutch team expected them to train.

Van Baarle added those issues had resulted in his decision to leave the team, for Soudal QuickStep, and he also linked Yates’s retirement, at least in part, to the dissatisfaction he had with the training regime.

Fem van Empel has quit her cycling career, at least for now, after deciding she had had enough, even though she had two years to run on her contract (Photo: Alessandro Gandolfo)

Aside from Giro d’Italia champion Yates’s departure, cyclocross world and European champion for the last three years, Fem van Empel, pulled the plug on her career, mid race, last month. She is aged 23 years and had two more seasons remaining on her Visma-Lease a Bike deal.

“At the moment, both the motivation and the enjoyment I have had in cycling for years are missing,” she said after abandoning Koppenbergcross and then confirming she was stepping away from the sport.

Giro d’Italia winner Tom Dumoulin had a stop-start time of it with Jumbo Visma, as it was then, before opting out in 2022. He had announced he would retire at the end of the season but barely raced after the spring of 2022 and stopped abruptly in mid August.

“It was really, really awful. I hated cycling so much, and I hated being there so much,” he later said of riding the Tour de France in 2020, finishing 7th overall.

Tom Dumoulin had a tough time of it over the final years of his career before calling it quits early during the 2022 season (Photo: Pauline Ballet)

Speaking about Yates at a pre-season team media outing in La Nucia, Plugge said: “It’s his choice, it is what it is. It would have been better if he’d told us… whenever, in September or something like that.

“We can’t dwell on that for a very long time, it is what it is. Over the Christmas. We had a discussion it was a good talk, and it was a clear message.”

He added he did not try and convince Yates to change his mind.

“If somebody told you they want to retire what are you going to say, ‘don’t do it’? It doesn’t work. He will have thought about it and he did, of course, and we know him also as somebody who thinks a lot about things and then comes with his own idea.”

Richard Plugge said the exits of Yates, Van Empel and Dumoulin from his Visma-Lease a Bike team were all very different cases (Photo: Tim van Wichelen-Cor Vos)

When asked about Yates suddenly stopping, Visma Lease a Bike team leader Jonas Vingegaard conceded the British rider would be a big loss, especially from the Tour de France team.

However, he said he too had felt close to burn-out at times and if Yates wanted to stop, that was his decision. When asked about burnout, in the context of the star riders who have quit the team, Plugge was stoic.

“I don’t know if that is something we have a lot of attention for,” he said of any links between the cases of the three big name riders who have now stepped away from the team during their contracts.

“For example, you mention Tom Dumoulin. We gave him the opportunity to go, one he really liked, to go to a high altitude camp in Colombia

“We were, I think… we brought in the (riders’) families to high altitude camps. They were away from home seven weeks or eight weeks, and we brought home to the high altitude camps.

“So we tried to have an eye for that, and I think it works out. But I think also the different names you mentioned are completely different cases. Simon Yates just wanted to retire, it has nothing to do with… whatever. And also Fem is a different case to what Tom Dumoulin was.”

And though the life of a pro cyclist was very intense, Plugge pointed out many people were under pressure in life. Furthermore, a lot of cyclists were able to cope with the demands of the sport and were continuing with their careers.

“There are so many riders who can do this and enjoy it. If you still enjoy it, why would you stop? Top sport is demanding if you’re a cyclist a swimmer, we happen to have a coach from swimming and they also have a lot of pressure, football players….  I recommend the documentary on Beckham, I just saw it. That’s a lot of pressure….

“So I think, yes, there’s a lot of pressure but it’s also the way you cope with it. In general, not only for cyclists, or football players or whatever… The pressure on people, with all the social media and everyone has an opinion about you, it’s something in general which is more demanding for younger people. It’s not particularly for cyclists but in general.”