It’s not entirely new, of course, but it will be in the 2026 Tour de France: in the team time trial on the first day in Barcelona, it will no longer be the time of the fifth rider of each team that counts, but every rider will receive his individual finishing time for the general classification. A format that Richard Plugge, team manager of Visma | Lease a Bike, finds challenging.
ASO has already experimented with this new formula three times during Paris-Nice. And notably, in 2023 and 2025, it was Visma | Lease a Bike that actually took victory in those team time trials.
“For me, a team time trial is a team time trial, where the beauty is that you need the whole team and your fourth or fifth rider also has to keep up," Plugge told HLN. "Now it’s one big lead-out for the team leader. But it is what it is and we have to deal with it.”
ASO has previously indicated that they want to introduce this new concept because they don’t want one team to completely dominate the general classification in the first week of the Tour.
Paris-Nice| Rank | Rider | Time |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 30:26 | |
| 2 | + 15 | |
| 3 | + 25 | |
| 4 | + 30 | |
| 5 | + 33 | |
| 6 | + 34 | |
| 7 | + 39 | |
| 8 | + 42 | |
| 9 | + 49 | |
| 10 | + 51 |
