The Tour blocks the controversial Visma van for not having accreditation

The Visma-Lease a Bike started the Tour by announcing a van converted into a state-of-the-art real-time data collection and analysis office. A very spectacular move that raised suspicions from the UCI and ensured that they would investigate to prevent it from providing a technological advantage. However, the intervention of the UCI was not necessary because the Tour organization has blocked it, seemingly definitively, for not having accreditation.

The Visma Control Room is not accredited

The Tour de France 2024 began and the teams showed off their best, including the new data analysis van with which the Visma-Lease a Bike team wanted to gain a competitive advantage through the real-time collection and interpretation of information about what was happening in the race.

The UCI quickly took action and announced an investigation to see if this van represented a large technological imbalance among the teams. But the ASO, organizer of the Tour, has taken the lead and issued a statement stating that this mobile "control room" "will not be authorized within any of the event facilities and therefore will not have vehicle accreditation."

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It seems that this decision by the organization comes from a lack of foresight on the part of Visma-Lease a Bike, which did not timely request the vehicle accreditation. And it is known the strict control that the Tour has to allow people and vehicles into the event.

It is likely that this will not be the last time we hear about this vehicle and despite the uproar it has caused, the team assures that it is a completely legal resource at the moment. "We use publicly available information for the control room. We are not entering a gray area in any way. And we are making the work of the team leaders safer. We will inform the UCI and, of course, they are more than welcome to come and take a look," Richard Pluge told Dutch media.