'At one point or another, it's never easy to be suffering on everybody's wheels' – Simon Yates reveals why his Visma-Lease a Bike transfer could radically boost his career

Simon Yates has never been one to beat around the bush, and when he is asked about the reason behind quitting Jayco-AIUIa, his lifelong professional team, for Visma-Lease a Bike, he gets straight to the point. After over a decade at Jayco, he says, he felt he was repeatedly at the upper limits of what he could achieve with the Australian squad.

"Maybe I'll do worse here [in Visma], but I got the feeling I had got the best out of what I could do there [in Jayco]," Yates told a small group of reporters at his new team's media day this January.

"I was doing a lot of the training camps by myself, which is not a bad thing, and I enjoyed that freedom."

"But the sport is at such a high level now there came a point where I needed more input. I didn't have the knowledge. I didn't know what to do any more."

"So that was also another reason to make the change, because at one point or another, it's never easy to be suffering on everybody's wheels."

As a former Vuelta a España winner and Giro d'Italia podium finisher with stage victories in all three Grand Tours, it's fair to say that Yates' move to Visma was one of the most high-profile transfers of 2024-2025. But it's also true that a couple of years back, just when his brother Adam's career began to flourish at UAE Team Emirates, Simon's had begun to flatline a little.

Nobody could call a fourth place in the 2023 Tour de France, his best overall result to date in the race, a poor achievement. But the 2024 Tour saw him drop back down the ladder to eighth overall. Simultaneously, in the last two years, he has only added three wins, a stage of the Tour Down Under and a stage and the overall of the AIUIa Tour, to his much more considerable career total of 34. 

All of these factors helped direct Yates towards reaching the conclusion that, if as he puts it, he wanted to reach the full extent of his potential -  or at the very least know for sure that this was as good as it would get for hereon -  then it was time for him t move outside his comfort zone. Perhaps inevitably after spending all his career at Jayco-AIUIa, that most likely meant switching teams.

"I think a lot of WorldTour teams are close to each other now, it's just the finer details that separate the top ones from the others," he says.

"This one [Visma] is very tightly organised, and the people here are very direct: this is how we do things, this is the way it's done. It was the opposite at Jayco, where I had a lot of freedom and I enjoyed having that, for certain periods."

"But there came a moment when I was doing my own thing and getting the same results, so I needed a change. And that's where I thought – ok, let's try this."

At 32, Yates is not getting any younger, either, and as he has said elsewhere, "I don't want to finish my career and have any regrets. I wanted to be the best version of myself." It also goes without saying that just because Yates couldn't find a way to hit even greater heights at Jayco, the same applies (or has applied) to any other rider. 

But in his own, very specific case, he believed not looking for change would have felt like standing still, and, he says, maybe even one day have led to him retiring earlier than desired. But having moved on, he says, "I don't feel I'm ready for that yet."

A bar that keeps on rising

The way the bar is constantly rising at the top end of the sport also made it hard not to get restless about his former team, too, he admits. As Yates puts it, "You used to be able to use these races to get fit, but now if you start in Australia, everybody's fit, everybody's ready. They're all on the right nutrition. There are no secrets."

With that constant rise in competitivity in the peloton very much in mind, one specific demand he made of Visma when signing for the Dutch squad was that he would get to work with Tim Heemskerk, Jonas Vingegaard's trainer.

"It's one of the reasons why I am here," he says, "because I want to learn from the best. Jonas has shown himself to be one of the best riders in the world and I am also searching for that, I want to see if I can make that jump. So I made the decision to work with his coach."

So far, he says, there are definite differences in his training approach, but it would be wrong to call it completely unknown territory too.

"I will not go into excruciating detail, some things should be kept private, but it's definitely a different approach -  everything from the timings of how much things are done to when to do them. That's a big difference, but it's nothing space age."

Quite apart from the different resources and training schedules Yates now has at his disposal - and if he also says the new training isn't 'groundbreaking', it's far too soon to judge its long-term effect - there are some definite 'firsts' at Visma. For one thing, the Briton had never previously been an inside witness to how a double Tour de France winner like Vingegaard trains, and even in the space of a month or so, his closer view of the Dane has impressed him.

"He's got a real attention to detail, I was not expecting that to be different but to see it in first person - that was inspiring, and quite motivating," Yates says. "Hopefully I'll pick up some things from him."

Moving on

The wrench of leaving a team like Jayco-AIUIa, where Simon turned pro in 2014 and remained for over a decade, was not a small one, he recognises. But if he still shows affection for his past squad, the emotional cost of quitting was a price he was willing to pay.

"The trainer I had in Jayco, Josh Hunt, is one of my best mates," he said. "So it was difficult to leave."

"He'd only joined in 2020, but we had a fantastic relationship, so that was one of those things I'll miss. There were my own mechanics, my own soigneur, I had the whole team around me, and they were all there for me at races. So it wasn't not easy to change. But I had to make that sacrifice."

Drawing parallels between his career path and Adam Yates decision to move from Jayco first to Ineos in 2021 and then UAE in 2023 is not hard to do. But Simon says more than simply drawing a leaf from his brother's book, it helped him gain inner strength to take the plunge and switch teams.

"I got advice from him, yes, because we're really close and after the proposal came in, we spoke. But seeing how he'd done wasn't the reason to go."

"I was comfortable at Jayco and enjoyed my time there, but I'd never changed teams before, so I didn't know what it was going to be like. It [Adam's move] gave me confidence that I did make the change, it was going to be ok."

For better or worse, in any case, Yates has moved on and apart from the fresh infrastructure, new teammates and raising of the stakes at the Tour, Yates also says it's refreshing to be in a squad where there are other riders looking for overall Grand goals. That's very unlike Jayco, where in terms of GC battles at least - and arguably more so since his brother left four years earlier - a great deal pivoted around him.

"Yes, absolutely, at the Tour we had Dylan [Groenewegen] there but many, many Giros I went to where I was the whole focus," Yates says, There was no Plan B if anything went wrong, even the slightest thing."

"So it was a lot of pressure, a lot of things to deal with. With Wout [van Aert] and Olav [Kooij] being there for Visma this May, it takes the pressure off me. I can just do my thing, stick to my strengths on the mountain stages and try to do what I can."

Back to the Giro

For all Yates is operating in a very different environment, Simon's first major GC goal at Visma is a very familiar one, at a Grand Tour with which he has a 'love- hate' relationship: the Giro d'Italia.

For all the Vuelta may be the Grand Tour where he's known most success, winning it in 2018 and the Tour the one he's started the most often – seven times to the Giro's five – the experiences he's had in Italy easily explained those feelings. For one thing, Yates is unlikely to have forgotten coming so close to winning the corsa rosa in 2018, only to be laid low by exhaustion on a crunch Alpine stage on what he later described as his 'hardest day on the bike'. Another brutal Giro GC moment for Yates was the COVID-19 that scuppered his chances in 2020, and yet another knee injury that left him out for the count in the third week of 2022. 

But at the same time, there was that long spell in the Giro lead in 2018 and crushing domination of his rivals that went with it, as well as a career-best third place overall and a stunning stage win at the Sega di Ala in 2021, a climb so steep some journalists burned their car clutches out trying to drive up it.

"Most of the time I had setbacks, the form was there," Yates recalls, "but I got sick or injured so it got quite tiring, actually to pick myself up again and go again. We'll see. The Giro is so unpredictable it's maybe hard to avoid bad luck sometimes."

If Primoz Roglič (Bora-Hansgrohe-Red Bull) status as the most recent Giro winner on this year's startline makes him the standout pre-race favourite, Yates' past experience, both the highs and the lows, will likely give him a position as one of the top contenders as well. For one thing, he's got considerable inside knowledge about doing the Giro, and that's even when it comes to building for the race, let alone riding it.

For example, in principle, he's not planning on doing any high mountains Giro recons, because, he says the spring weather in Italy is so treacherous it can scupper any attempts to traverse the Alps in April or March. Then when it comes to the race itself, he's also under few illusions as to the defects he perceives in this year's initially fairly unchallenging Giro route.

"It's not the best I've ever seen, it's pretty uninspiring really. I would prefer a much harder start," he says. "Don't get me wrong, it's going to be a difficult start in Albania there, but some of my best Giro GCs have been when it's been a really hard first few days like on Mount Etna or even two years ago in the Tour, too, in Bilbao."

"I prefer that, because the riders finish their altitude camp and they're ready to race. But then we go to the race and we have to wait 10 days to have some action. It's a bit boring, almost."

As for what he can achieve on such an initially – in his eyes – anodyne route, Yates is relatively cautious about opening up too soon on his goals. But for now, nothing, including the win, is ruled out, either.

"I've got to play that by ear, and assess the situation as it goes on," he argues. "Of course, it's nice to say - win or nothing. But as the days tick by, more and more guys are throwing their names into the GC ring." These include, of course, his own brother Adam, with the fans keenly anticipating a duel which Simon is keen to play down as 'something the media's very interested in, but the truth is we've been rivals since he left Orica.'

"Early on, I'll have to have good legs, stay out of trouble, " he concludes, "but in any case, the last week is so hard there's really nowhere to hide. So hopefully the form is there and I'll see what I can do."

Yet whatever the outcome come May, there's no doubt either that 2025 represents a very new, remarkable starting line for Yates, and at 32, that's maybe not as easy to find as it would be for younger pros. Racing alongside Vingegaard and in a team with such a stacked line-up will give the Briton all the resources he needs to try and make this new chapter the best one of his career to date. Onwards, then and – Yates is hoping – upwards.