The radio mess in the Tour, INEOS and Visma break the agreement with ASO

During the last few years, the broadcasts of the Tour de France have been spiced up with small pieces of communication between team cars and their riders through the famous earpiece. Most of them inconsequential. Most, that is, because in the recently concluded edition of the Tour de France, some messages were reportedly broadcast that have angered the affected teams.

INEOS and Visma upset with radio messages broadcast during the Tour

I'm sure we all remember, in the Tour de France 2023, that moment when Tadej Pogacar cracked on the way to Col de la Loze and his words in the radio communication with his car made it clear that the fight for the yellow jersey was definitively slipping away with that brief "I'm gone, I'm dead".

Since a few years ago, the production of the French race, in the hands of its organizer ASO, reached an agreement with the teams to be able to tap into the radios in the same way it is done in Formula 1 broadcasts, we have been able to hear small pieces of what is said throughout a stage between the team car and the cyclists.

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Communications that are carefully selected after listening to them and are broadcast minutes after they occur. In most cases, they are inconsequential with instructions to their cyclists to stay together when a difficult moment in the race approaches or mere words of encouragement, for which the teams that had signed the collaboration agreement received €5,000.

However, in this edition of the Tour de France, everything has gone wrong and since stage 17, Visma-Lease a Bike decided to stop sharing their transmissions with ASO's production. "We are in favor of anything that gets more fans hooked on this sport, but this cannot affect the race or the planned strategy and, in our opinion, it has affected too much. We are not the only ones who think this, there are several other teams who do not like it," said Jasper Saeijs, marketing director of Visma-Lease a Bike.

According to Saeijs, it would not be a specific incident that led them to make the decision to no longer share their communications but rather the accumulation of small details. And it is that, although the communications are reviewed before being broadcast to avoid containing information about tactics or the development of the race, sometimes the line between what is relevant information and what is not is too thin.

INEOS Grenadiers have expressed the same sentiment as the Dutch team. In total, there are 6 teams that have shown reluctance to continue sharing communications and having to constantly watch their words on the radio to prevent anything unwanted from being broadcast. In any case, there is still plenty of time until the next edition of the Tour de France and, for sure, ASO will try to find a new formula to enrich the broadcasts.